NEWS AS A PUBLIC VALUE AND INTERNET BASED CHALLENGES: THE CASE OF NORTHERN CYPRUS

Abstract

One of the key areas of communication research is how the developments in communication technologies with regards to the media-democracy relationship have affected political diversity, the right to information and similar phenomena related to politics of democracy. Inarguably, the Internet and its more recent application, the social media, have created far more radical changes than previous technologies. There are many studies that emphasize the positive effects of the Internet on journalism. In this research, negative effects of the Internet on news production processes, that have not been sufficiently focused on to date, are attempted to be identified. By evaluating discussions, news and columns on the subject published in the Turkish Cypriot media, as well as complaints made to the Media Ethics Committee and Yeniduzen newspaper's ombudsman, the problems caused by the Internet are grouped into labor theft, information pollution, deterioration of news language, loss of motivation, false news and negative effects of ``breaking news{''} reporting. In the second phase of the research, structured interviews were conducted with the managing or chief editors of Yeniduzen, Kibris, Havadis and Kibris Postasi newspapers, and the effects of the Internet-related problems on the news processes were identified. The research shows that Internet-related problems lead to significant harm to Turkish Cypriot journalism. For example, news correspondent employment, which will increase the quality of news production, is gradually decreasing. In addition, the number of political and social news produced by media professionals is diminishing, while speculative, manipulative, fake, entertainment, and stolen news are on the rise. The Turkish Cypriot media are in the small media category in terms of employment, capital investment and audience/readers. The extent to which mainstream media are experiencing Internet-related problems may be the subject of a separate study. However, it is a fact that the same problems have damaging effects on the alternative media, which are usually small organizations.