A: Discuss the development, evolution history and characteristics of news media in the past century.

Refer to the following information, hoping to help your problem.

This paper aims to trace the evolution history of the word convergence in the field of news communication, clarify its connotation and extension in different contexts, so as to trace back to the source and make people have a clearer understanding of the phenomenon and development trend of media convergence.

Trace the origin of convergence

According to the notes in the Oxford English Dictionary, the word Convergence originated from the field of science. For example, in 17 13, the British scientist William Deleusme talked about the convergence and divergence of rays. Subsequently, the word was gradually applied to meteorology, mathematics, evolutionary biology, political science and economics.

The real combination of integration and mass communication originated from the development of computers and networks in the mid-1970s. Farber and Baran published an article "Convergence of Computing and Telecommunication Systems" in 1977. Nicolas Negroponte of Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1978) used a legend to demonstrate the convergence process of three intersecting rings, which represent computer industry, publishing and printing industry and broadcasting and film industry respectively. This famous legend shows for the first time the foresight that different industries are about to merge and are tending to merge, and has won the favor of business leaders. For this purpose, Negroponte received millions of dollars' sponsorship, which enabled him to establish the later prestigious media laboratory at 1985.

Subsequently, more and more thinkers in the field of news communication began to realize the influence of scientific and technological development on news media. For example, William Paley, chairman of CBS, delivered a speech at the annual meeting of 1980 broadcasting industry, focusing on the new challenges brought by the integration of news and information dissemination mechanisms (Gordon, 2003).

It is difficult to know who first used the word "integration" to spread the related fields of science and technology, but the communication scholar Ithiel De Sola Pool has made great contributions to the popularization of this word (Gordon, 2003). In his masterpiece "Free Technology" from 65438 to 0983, Poole put forward "the convergence of modes", and he believed that the development of digital electronic technology was the reason for the convergence of different communication forms.

1994, when The New York Times reported the San Jose Mercury News and AOL) * * * launched an electronic newspaper service called Mercury Center News, it used a subtitle: "A Media Convergence" (Gordon, 2003).

In the early 1990s, communication, consumer electronics, media and computers could still exist as independent industries, providing different services through different communication modes. However, with the development of computer digital technology, digital convergence has not only changed the time, space and cost for mass media to obtain information, but also provided important technical support for the industrial convergence of telecommunications, publishing and radio and television industries. In this regard, greenstein and Kana defined integration as "the blurring or disappearance of industrial boundaries to adapt to industrial growth" (Cao Wei, Hao Yalin, 2004). When AOL and time warner Inc. announced their historic merger in early 2000, the word convergence has become the common language of electronic information dissemination (Gordon, 2003).

Different meanings of convergence in news communication

However, this increasingly popular term has many different meanings even in the field of news communication, which leads to people's vague understanding of the word. In view of this, Ricky Gordon classifies the meaning of this word in different communication contexts as follows:

The Integration of Media Technology

Although the era of complete integration of science and technology has not yet arrived, Poole's concept of integration of communication forms has made us see the future development of media technology: the establishment and wide use of digital communication content management system in media institutions can transmit various digital forms to different communication platforms relatively easily. For example, TV will have more computer characteristics, so that it can be connected to the network, not only receiving and storing digital content, but also allowing viewers to interact with advertisements and other content on the screen. Now mobile phones have the functions of shooting, recording, watching TV programs, sending and receiving emails, etc. It can be said that the integration of media technology is the basis of all subsequent integration in the field of news communication.

Integration of media ownership.

The highest integration of media groups today refers to the concentration of media ownership. Viacom, Disney, Vivendi Universal and AOL time warner Inc. are usually regarded as typical cases of media ownership merger in today's global economic environment. When AOL merged with time warner Inc. in 2000, the Financial Times of London commented that this merger clearly showed for the first time that the long-awaited integration of various programs and their modes of transmission was becoming a reality (Gordon, 2003).

However, the merger of media ownership has attracted the attention of many media critics. Ben Bagdikian, a journalist and scholar, predicted in the first edition of 1983 Media Monopoly that some media companies would control what most ordinary Americans read, hear and see. He is worried that this concentration of ownership and control of content will suppress different voices in society, which will lead to news communication not being able to describe social reality comprehensively and accurately.

In the United States, long before the integration of science and technology, concerns about the concentration of media ownership led the Federal Communications Commission to pass the restrictions on radio/television cross-ownership in 1970. 1975 passed the ban on newspaper/radio cross-shareholding, which does not allow a media company to own both radio and television media and newspapers in the same city, limiting the scope of owning radio and television media at the same time.

However, with the passage of time, the merger interest and development trend of media ownership are increasing in the industry. Like Jack, the president of Tribune Publishing Group? Jack Fuller said: having TV, radio and newspapers in the same market can reduce costs, improve efficiency and provide better news (Gordon, 2003). Due to the development of information communication technology, especially network communication, the restrictions on media ownership in the past are outdated and cannot meet the actual needs of the current media market.

In view of this, 1996, the United States revised and passed the new Telecommunications Law, which removed the restrictions on cross-industry operation of the communications industry and allowed communication operators to operate other types of communication media in an open competition manner to cope with the new communication environment brought by new technologies. Media companies integrate property rights, operations and products through acquisitions and mergers to form large-scale multimedia groups and engage in multimedia business with economies of scale. In this way, the production and operation of newspapers, TV stations, radio stations, movies and internet websites can break the boundaries of each other and interact and integrate, so as to realize resource sharing and derive different forms of information products, and then promote each other, promote sales and spread them to the audience through different platforms, achieving twice the result with half the effort.

Integration of media strategies

Tactical alliance does not need the merger of media ownership, and usually refers to the cooperation of TV, newspapers, movies, networks and other media under different ownership in the field of content and marketing. Media symbiosis tells people that only by interdependence can the media flourish. This interdependence is just like the relationship between movies and television, records and radio.

The original intention of media tactical cooperation is to promote their respective media products. For example, the partners of newspapers and TV believe that cross-marketing can drive newspaper readers to watch TV and TV viewers to watch newspapers; Television viewers can know the news stories in tomorrow's newspaper, and newspaper readers can see the latest weather forecast of TV stations from the weather page; Newspaper reporters can let TV reporters provide more detailed and in-depth information when they broadcast news on the spot; Television reporters carry cameras, while newspaper photographers carry digital cameras. If the newspaper only needs one photo and the TV station only needs more than 20 seconds of video for a ribbon-cutting ceremony, there is no need to send two photographers.

The structural convergence of media organizations.

With the integration of media technology and media ownership, the job responsibilities and media organizational structure of media practitioners will also change. For example, when Orlando Sentinel cooperated with time warner Inc. Cable TV to open a 24-hour local news channel, they formed a multimedia editing team, most of whom had broadcasting background. They coordinate between the two news editorial departments, communicate with reporters, and turn newspaper contents into TV news. This is the organizational integration of the media according to needs.

In this regard, it is the "Media Association" in Tampa, Florida that really implements the concept of media organizational structure integration and develops it to the extreme. The group has concentrated all its newspapers (Tampa Tribune), TV stations (WFLA-TV) and Internet websites (Tampa Bay Online) in the same building, under the same roof and in the same news room, and interviewers of various media cooperate and coordinate with each other in reporting news. Even when the same reporter interviews newspaper, TV news and electronic real-time news at the same time, the same information is packaged into products suitable for different media in different forms, which expands the market, saves costs and gains greater benefits (Jim Koon Lim, 2003).

Integration of information collection.

When journalists talk about media convergence, the focus is always on whether each reporter needs to use different reporting tools in the future. For example, do newspaper reporters run around with heavy cameras and recording equipment? For this reason, engineers at Columbia University have developed a portable workstation that can be carried on the back so that journalists can collect various forms of content (Gordon, 2003).

In 2002, the concept of backpack reporter first appeared on the online news review website, which caused great repercussions. Jane Allen Stevens proudly claimed to be a backpacker. She is a reporter for a newspaper and a photographer for TV stations and websites. "Now can you imagine hiring a reporter who doesn't understand computers? Ten years later, you can't imagine hiring a reporter who can't work across media. " Preston Mendenhall of MSNBC is a typical backpacker. He traveled all over Afghanistan for half a month and sent back a large number of written manuscripts, still photos, audio and video recordings, which were broadcast on radio and websites (Gordon, 2003).

The fusion of news narration.

The appearance of Internet makes it possible to integrate news narrative forms. The form of multimedia news communication is a news narrative way that combines words, photos, sounds, videos, animations and charts. The online interactive feature report of St. Petersburg Times, Florida, USA produced a series of excellent multimedia in-depth reports, including a report on a black street in St. Petersburg, which combined newspaper text, broadcast sound, TV images and interactive charts to let the audience enjoy their senses in all directions.

Compared with the past single media reporting methods, the multimedia news produced by the integration of news narrative forms has the following characteristics:

1. Large capacity: The capacity of network multimedia news based on information technology is almost unlimited, which is no longer limited by traditional news layout and time, and the storage cost is getting lower and lower.

2. Real-time: Multimedia news can update information anytime and anywhere to meet people's increasingly high requirements for news timeliness.

3. Interaction: Different from the one-way communication of traditional media, the information transmission of multimedia news is two-way. Users can not only receive information, but also feed back information and decide the content, order and time of browsing.

4. Multi-terminal: The terminals of multimedia news can be computers, mobile phones, televisions, and even e-books and newspapers that you can carry with you.

Convergence in Chinese Translation

Generally speaking, in the field of news communication in Chinese mainland, Hongkong and Taiwan Province, there are four translations of the word convergence: convergence, fusion, aggregation and integration. According to Modern Chinese Dictionary and other Chinese dictionaries, confluence mainly refers to the meeting of water or people. Aggregation has two meanings: (1) gathering together; (2) In chemical engineering, it refers to the method of combining monomers into polymer composites; And integration refers to the integration of several different things; Integration is to gather different opinions or things, re-integrate them and become a new whole. Therefore, I personally think that media integration and media integration can better reflect the original intention of the word integration. Of course, the best translation method is to translate the word integration into merger (such as the integration of media ownership), alliance (such as the integration of media tactics), integration or integration (such as the integration of media technologies/the integration of media technologies) according to the different meanings of the word integration in different contexts.

The influence of integration on journalism and academia

Media convergence is the most important development phenomenon of news communication industry in the last century. The multimedia communication functions of the Internet, such as words, sounds and images, have greatly changed the operation mode of communication organizations, enabling the media to collect, publish and share information through various platforms. The integration of media and the development of media technology promote the emergence of integrated news. Carrie Anna Criado and Camille Kraeplin, professors of Southern Methodist University in Texas, USA, have conducted a comprehensive survey on the media integration development of journalism and communication industry and journalism schools in the United States for the first time since 2002. The main conclusions are as follows:

1. Media organizations and news educators generally believe that media integration is very important for the future development of the news communication industry;

2. Most of the newspapers and TV stations they investigated have formed tactical media alliances, sharing news and human resources with each other;

3. Journalism courses in universities have also begun to merge, because it is very important and necessary to integrate journalism skills training, and cross-platform communication training has been or will be included in the curriculum planning.

In the past, journalists usually learned a kind of media communication skills, and then took their chosen field as a lifelong career place. However, journalists in the 2 1 century should recognize the development trend of media convergence, strive to strengthen cross-media communication skills training, and become integrated journalists with various forms of writing and communication skills.