Newspapers: The Effects of Online Technology

• UK's daily newspapers have lost 2.25 million readers in the last 10 years
• Revenue for newspapers has fallen by about 20%
• In the next 10 years, one or two of Britain's biggest daily newspapers predicted to close down
• "the world is changing and newspapers have to adapt" - Rupert Murdoch, NewsCorp
• “The internet has given readers much more power.  Everybody wants choice and thanks to the personal computer, people are taking charge of their own lives and they read what they want to read or what they are interested in and young people today are living on their computers.  The world is changing and newspapers have to adapt to that.” - Rupert Murdoch, NewsCorp
• “These days journalists rarely break the story, most compelling pictures come from eyewitnesses, and not from journalists.  Curating news is as important as news gathering, because citizen journalism is not a fab or an intriguing addition to traditional journalism, but here to stay.  Social media is the news gathering of the first report..... Passive audiences are gone forever.  Today, media owners need to embrace the ‘digital conversations’ with their new, activist, audiences.” - Chris Cramer, Global Editor of Multimedia at Reuters (business news)
• "news revolution"
• citizen journalism

1. Ignoring Signs of Change: Prior to the introduction of the internet in the '80s, newspaper executives ignored signs of change like competition from real time news networks

2. Dismissing unconventional competitors: chose traditional formats while some titles were publishing on terminals, television, Internet, and periodicals. Most decided not to change

3. Experimenting too narrowly: Some newspapers did spot the rise of digital technology early and experiment with alternatives.  However, most of these companies limited the scope of their experimentation to replicating their paper offering on-line rather than encouraging audience interaction.

4. Giving up on promising experiments too quickly: Promising business models take time to become successful in many cases and the process entails many setbacks.  Some newspapers did not give new ideas time to build.

5. Embarking on a ‘crash course’: Many institutions felt they were not embracing technology quickly enough and pushed for mergers which did not work.

Traditional Paper-based Form	Online News Site
Has a purchase price.  Is not free	Has predominantly free content
Can only be accessed from newspaper vendors	Can be accessed anywhere with internet access
Can be easily marked or destroyed	Content remains even if portal of access is destroyed.
Usually target a specific audience base	Also target specific although a bit more varied
Costly to produce; paper, printing etc.	Not as expensive but still costly to run; servers, maintenance staff plus journalists etc.
Costly to distribute	Cheap to distribute
Offer limited news stories which are not copy and pasted. Ability to archive physical copy but takes up space.	Can offer countless news stories at any one time plus the ability to archive stories, although many of these news stories are simply replications or re-workings of main news stories and may be cut and pasted news stories from other mainstream news sites.
Only print version of story available	Only version of story available but option of printing it
Cannot be updated immediately and regularly	Can be updated immediately and regularly
Is not interactive	Can be interactive
Cannot allow audience immediate feedback/ citizen journalism	Allows for immediate audience feedback and citizen journalism
Can offer in-depth analysis and comment but is limited by space.	Varied options for expansion of topic matter.  In depth editorials and comment.

Audience Gratifications of The Guardian website.

Feature	Audience Gratification
Long-running chat boards	Allows the audience a chance to interact with the other users who have similar interests, giving them credibility for raising, helping with or even participating in the discussion
Network of weblogs	Individual blogs a collected together and published on one main blog discussing similar topics
Leaving comments on articles	Can make an audience feel powerful by creating the idea that they are challenging the news institution’s values
Readers can access articles online, on mobile devices through RSS feeds or on eBook readers.	Gives the audience the power to keep up to date with the latest updates from their subscribed websites without having to use most of their internet usage. Keeps audiences up-to-date with current affairs.
Varied selection of categories in easy accessible genre areas	Allows the audience to chose what they want to read
Images	Makes audiences associate the image with topic being discussed.
Podcast	Keeps audiences up-to-date with discussions they may have missed on TV or radio.
Access to paper-based content	Provides easily accesible content without having to wait for it to load.
Dating sites/ personals	Achieve success through the use of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs