As globalisation accelerates, the world has witnessed a great expansion in the movement of people, money, goods and services, and changes in communications technologies and allowed information to move unfettered throughout the world. Oddly, this has not brought the world closer together in terms of news coverage of the world. Recent decades have seen not an expanding but a shrinking presence of foreign correspondents and a decrease in the levels of world news coverage in many countries. Changing geopolitical interests and collapsing news business models help to explain this state of affairs. At the same time, advances in communication technologies have opened unprecedented opportunities for low-budget independent media outlets and spread both their coverage of, and distribution to the outside world. While in the vast majority of cases they cannot serve as a substitute for on-the-ground newsgathering, it would appear that they do have a role to play in propping up an industry in decline, and contributing to our knowledge about the outside world. This panel will focus the news media from this perspective.
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