Wednesday, Jul 30, 2008    Text size: 

Replete with the observations of some of Europe's leading scholars, "The Internet and the Mass Media," is a 200-page work that offers "a comprehensive analysis of the impact of the Internet on media and mediated content industries."

The result of a five-year EU sponsored research initiative, the report explores the changes that the Internet has imposed on the traditional media and content industries, as well as the implications of those changes.

According to Richard van der Wurff, who penned one of the report's essays, the Internet has made an enormous amount of media content widely available — but it is additional content rather than new content.

"[It is] old wine in smaller and more accessible bottles," Wurff said, commenting on how the Internet has had little appreciable impact on the types and formats of content offered to viewers.

For example, online newspapers may offer viewers the ability to read individual articles rather than presenting an entire page of news stories, but those articles are usually simple reprints of the same articles published in the paper's print edition.

"New content, specifically made for the Internet, such as real-time [news] stories that are updated during the day, is scarce," Wurff said. "And new content formats – such as interactive reporting – are even scarcer."

This, Wurff asserts, is because media organizations see the Internet as a low-cost, secondary promotion and distribution channel that is best used to serve existing audiences while attracting new ones.

According to Wurff, producing new content exclusively for online distribution isn't attractive due to the difficulty media companies' face in recovering the high costs — a problem made more significant by the increase in non-media organizations and private individuals that distribute free content online.

This has led to three dominant types of new and Internet-specific content:

"Content niches where audiences are willing to make substantial payments (such as retail financial and investment services, professional and scholarly information or porn); areas where 'amateur' content providers are very active and do not put a price on all costs (for example, weblogs and social networking sites); and on websites of organizations where the profit motive is not dominant or even absent (for example, websites of European public broadcasters)," Wurff concluded.