While the public echo received by the so-called "newspaper crisis" to a great extent reflects the symbolic investment in the industry, there is no denying that traditional print media are floundering as advertising revenues flee online and circulation figures plummet. The result has been substantial cutbacks in newsrooms and mass lay offs of journalists – with all the implications this has for the standard of media content.

The situation is paradoxical. At the same time as traditional newspapers increasingly find themselves struggling to survive, statistics suggest that the interest in news has never been greater. Internet users spend more time than ever reading newspapers online, while blogs, community websites, and citizen journalism enter the field as genuine challengers to the established titles. It is no coincidence that a normative notion of "quality", having gone into hiding after postmodernism's assault on high culture, is making a comeback at precisely the moment the exclusive authority of institutions conventionally guaranteeing quality is challenged.

Yet if we accept the premise that every medium has the potential to be an outlet for quality, then this has reaching consequences for the discussion of the crisis. The relevant question is not how to preserve a certain medium, but how to finance editorial structures that can produce high-quality journalism. As Heribert Prantl , an editor of the Süddeutsche Zeitung, writes, "We should stop the vapid talk of how classical journalism is disappearing into a 'Bermuda Triangle'. Good classical journalism is no different from good online journalism."

The cultural-symbolic dimensions of the quality debate become even more pronounced in the other major debate preoccupying cultural sector: the future of the book (trade). Reports of the death of the book have so far been greatly exaggerated. However, as electronic reading devices such as Amazon's Kindle and Sony's Reader become better and more functional, the traditional book trade is bound to change. Are book publishers better prepared to handle the digital revolution than music companies were when the file-sharing boom hit the industry ten years ago? Will new distribution channels and technical possibilities fundamentally change the character of the most prestigious symbol of western culture? These and other questions are discussed by Pascal Fouché, author of an encylopedia of the book, in interview with Marc-Oliver Padis and Olivier Mongin.

Media-technological developments and the mass availability of information are forcing a reconsideration of the legal approach to intellectual property. The digital revolution raises difficult questions about how to weigh different interests against each other. The Google Books project and Open Access publishing are only two – intrinsically different – endeavours that highlight the need to reconsider the concept of intellectual property rights in the light of new communication technologies. The question as to how can a revised notion of copyright combine public interest with authors' claims to intellectual property is approached here by Mikhail Xifaras and others.

All fields of publishing and culture, from the literary book trade to the academic production of knowledge, from cultural journals to radio and television, are experiencing ways in which media change intersects with issues of free speech. After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, great hopes were put in the development of free media as guarantor of democracy and watchdog on political and commercial power in the "new democracies". Notwithstanding the profound positive changes in the media structures of many post-communist states, new and subtler forms of censorship have emerged.

The religious "offence" debate is a further aspect of the free speech debate: as Jytte Klausen writes, the controversies over the Mohammed caricatures would have been impossible without the global nature of contemporary media, together with an agenda in which scandal sells. Yet the discussion about free speech and the public sphere cannot be confined to matters of religion. Especially in some countries in eastern and south-eastern Europe, the representation of cultural difference and minorities in and by the media is a crucial issue.

With the exception of media for business and political elites, and sports and entertainment television, European media structures are still largely framed by national borders. Without cross-border interaction, stances taken at the national level tend to remain limited in perspective, thereby reinforcing euroscepticism and intolerance. While there is a considerable quantity of material looking at individual aspects of the media across Europe, there is no substantial, comprehensive and widely accessible approach to the subject. The Eurozine focal point "Changing media – Media in change" aims at connecting different aspects of the debate; to highlight common features without sacrificing the differences. It is conceived as a forum for ongoing debate and its many sub-debates as they evolve across Europe and beyond.

The Eurozine editors

Published 2010-09-16

Original in English
Contributed by Eurozine
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