Introduction: Transformation and Continuity

First paragraph of introduction: News matters. It remains the main forum for discussion of issues of publicimportance. It offers an arena in which journalists and media firms,politicians, other high-status sources of information, and audiences cometogether to inform, persuade, influence, endorse or reject one another in acollaborative process of making meaning from events. But the news ischanging in ways that are not yet well-understood. The news environment ofthe twenty-first century is being shaped by both emerging transformationsand contested continuities. Content, distribution channels, geographicalconstraints, production values, business models, regulatory approaches andcultural habits are all changing as new media technologies are adopted andadapted by users, often in unexpected ways. Established media organisationsare in many cases struggling to adapt to a changed environment - eventhough, paradoxically, they have driven many of the changes themselves.