Oleksandr E. World News Agencies and Formation of Global Communications Space

Dissertation made sophisticated inquiry into current functioning of world's largest news agencies and elucidated fundamental changes in their activity, which were traced over the past 5-10 years. Taking into account the complexity of such investigation, accomplished analysis has been divided into several lines of inquiry including: a) analysis of historical prerequisites that influenced current transformation of agencies' activity, and analysis of organizational changes in global system of news agencies, b) analysis of economic indicators that characterize everyday activity of world's largest news agencies, c) analysis of negative and positive features stipulated by the form of agencies' ownership, d) influence of new information technologies on evolution of world news agencies, e) analysis of changes caused by agencies' activity on global financial markets and global market for television news. In particular, the dissertation unambiguously demonstrated that such news agencies as Reuters (Great Britain), Associated Press (USA) and Agence France-Presse (France) remain world's largest news agencies while the 1990s featured their final alienation and technological separation from the less powerful entities operating on global news market. Besides, the dissertation proved that in the recent years world news agencies shifted to the new model of news dissemination notable for such features as lowered dependence on state financing, introduction of up-to-date information services, more active utilization of Internet in the sphere of news gathering and news distribution, grown number of used languages, integration of text, video, voice and reference services into combined information packages, refusal to accomplish scrupulous editing and correction of news gathered by agencies' own journalists and information sources, further perfection of their relations with national and regional mass media and news agencies.