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Media Houses are centralising their newsrooms Time for the movement to consider having its own? SAPA - the South African Press Agency - has been covering our movement's press conferences for many years, and selling its reports to the newspapers. It has been a major channel of communication for the ANC, the SACP, the trade unions, and all kinds of government departments. SAPA was a co-operative owned by media houses, selling them (and others) stories gathered by a central newsroom, but without a publication of its own. It is about to disappear. Three of the major media houses, formerly among the owners of SAPA, are now starting their own "press agencies", otherwise called "newswire services", to replace SAPA. [See: "Prepare for the war of the newswires", by Glenda Neville, 10 March 2015, here <http://themediaonline.co.za/2015/03/prepare-for-the-war-of-the-newswires/> ) These will be new, stand-alone newsrooms that will supply the titles in their respective media groups, and also supply subscribers outside of these groups. Presumably they will supply each other's news titles. Exactly how competition, priority and exclusivity will be handled, is not clear; but it may be that the media houses are less concerned than before with news "scoops", and more concerned with a combination of branding with opinion and outright propaganda. It is not stated, but it could simply be that the different media houses are merely downsizing to one central newsroom for each house, so that most individual news titles will be edited from copy on the Internet, with hardly any generation of copy in-house, and very little in-house sub-editing of news at the level of the separate titles, leaving them free to become more overtly political with their overall brand and with their branded commentators like, for example, Justice Malala and all the other "analysts", columnists, pundits et cetera. It remains to be seen what will then happen to the dedicated web sites that all news publishers, whether print or electronic, now have. These are presently the main public source of up-to-the-minute hard news, whether directly or via, for example, Google News. The three new agencies so far announced will be based on News24, Times Media, and the Independent Group. More could follow. Movement spin-doctors need to get the e-mail addresses of these new newsrooms on to their press release distribution lists. This may be the occasion for our movement to take a fresh, collective look at what is happening. It might be the moment to consider setting up a small central newsroom that could, for example, make available, instantly, from a single web site, all of the media releases of the Alliance Partners. Our own "news agency" could also send a reporter to live press conferences to produce suitable brief copy and sound files (soundbites and interviews) for newspapers and radio stations that cannot afford to attend all of the different press conferences. This is not so much a matter of a business opportunity, but a matter of communication opportunity. Our interest is in being able to communicate without friction or delay with the maximum number of people, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. "VC" -- -- You are subscribed. This footer can help you. Please POST your comments to [email protected] or reply to this message. You can visit the group WEB SITE at http://groups.google.com/group/yclsa-eom-forum for different delivery options, pages, files and membership. To UNSUBSCRIBE, please email [email protected] . You don't have to put anything in the "Subject:" field. You don't have to put anything in the message part. All you have to do is to send an e-mail to this address (repeat): [email protected] . --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "YCLSA Discussion Forum" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
