The Emergence of the Internet and the E...

Since the mid-1990s the Internet and the web have become increasingly more important pillars in the communicative infrastructure of most societies, and their impact on traditional media and journalism has been fundamental. Even though there appears to be an obvious link between these two facts, both the Internet and digital media are a much broader phenomenon than journalism. This chapter first provides a brief overview of the genesis of the Internet and the breadth of the use of the web. Based on this framework, it analyses changes in journalism since the early 1990s in six European countries: the United Kingdom, Ireland, Spain, Portugal, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia. The authors take into account the state of the media systems and journalism in each country prior to the ascent of the web and then discuss further developments and changes in journalism.