- Newspaper institutions are in competition with one another to ensure they have enough people consuming their products
- It is becoming increasingly difficult for paper-based news forms to compete with the rise in e-media news services.
- They make advertising their main source of money
- Falling circulations mean less money through the till and newspapers’ other main source of income, advertising, is also drying up.
- In the struggle to stay profitable, newspaper companies are cutting staff, closing offices and, in the case of local papers, getting rid of titles
WHY IS THE NEWSPAPER INDUSTRY IN CRISIS?
- Internet has changed newspapers
- As the internet increases its dominance on the media landscape
- Readers’ attention and loyalties have become divided as papers compete with round the clock reporting and unmediated content
- According to Sull, there are five reasons why the newspaper industry is in a deeper crisis than it should be:
- Ignoring Signs of Change: Since the early 1980’s, institutions have been able to access real time news through networks.
- Dismissing unconventional competitors: Newspapers ignored a steady stream of innovations that they might have imitated to enhance their own business model
- Experimenting too narrowly: Some newspapers did spot the rise of digital technology early and experiment with alternatives.
- Giving up on promising experiments too quickly: Promising business models take time to become successful in many cases and the process entails many setbacks.
- Embarking on a ‘crash course’: Many institutions felt they were not embracing technology quickly enough and pushed for mergers which did not work.
- With so many free news sites to choose from, audiences are not prepared to pay money to read newspapers online.
Should News be Free?
- James Murdoch of NewsCorp has been critical of free news provision online,
- its “expansion of state-sponsored journalism is a threat to the plurality and independence of news provision,”
- that news on the web provided by the BBC made it “incredibly difficult” for private news organisations to ask people to pay for their news.
- News Corporation has said it will start changing online customers for news content across all its websites in a bid to recoup and generate money from subscription, but this does not automatically mean that people will pay.
News Online – The Democratisation of News?
- News providers are finding themselves in a complex position in relationship to online technology but it is the changing lifestyles of audiences that pose the biggest problem for papers.
Audience Power
- In some ways audiences are more active in the way they consume news.
- The audience here uncovered links and applied steady pressure by writing about the company and soon the information was made available.
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