On Convergence

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On the 1st of October we visited Channel 12, Azcentral.com and Arizona Republic. These three media institutions have been in a convergence process.

It was a highly informative visit for all of us. Before the visit I had many questions in my mind. I found the anwers to some of them  during the visit and I wanna share three of them with you.

1) Is convergence a process forced by the financial difficulties experienced by these institutions due to global economic crisis ( It reminded me some of the families in my country who moved to the same house due to financial difficulties of global economic crisis)?  Simply no. In fact these three insitutions tried to converge at the beginning of 2000 ‘s but it was a failure.  The executives of these institutions stated that it was not a simple process.  They observed the examples around them very carefully for a long time. They saw that the process required a good preparation and the companies that started converging without preparing enough due to financial difficulties have not been successful.

2) They can converge physically simply by moving to the same place but how can they converge in their approach to news? I think this is the most difficult part of convergence process.  The executive of azcentral.com told me that it was really difficult. He said it was not difficult to converge the approaches in sports news or in breaking news but especially in investigative journalism it is hard to converge. That’s why these three institutions has delayed converging in this part of journalism.

3) Does this process work in our countries? Difficult. I believe for this process to work in other countries the market share of the media insitutions are important. In some countries one media institution has a share of 30-40 percent of the whole industry. I believe, in such countries it is difficult to talk about convergence.