According to the Newspaper Associate of America, newspapers have had the biggest drop in revenue since 1950. From 2006 to 2006 revenue dropped 9.4%, a total of $42 billion. The Washington Post said, "Average daily circulation of all U.S. newspapers has been in decline since 1987 as papers have faced mounting competition for reader attention and advertising. Online, newspapers are still a success -- but only in readership, not in profit. Ads on newspaper Internet sites sell for pennies on the dollar compared with ads in their ink-on-paper cousins."
I don't really have a strong opinion one way or another. Whether newspapers are around or they completely disappear. I think newspapers are eventually going to disappear completely, simply because our society today is becoming more and more technologically based. If the newspapers disappear completely then I think it'll slow our computers down when advertisements are constantly popping up on our screens when we're trying to get our news online. Jobs are going to be lost also, but I think that all of this has to happen just because our society is going to continue to advance.
Natalie provides very good evidence about how our society is becoming more internet based now a days and how that it is having effects on our economic situations. I believe that in our recession today that a lot of businesses including the general news industry is trying to save people as much money as possible. Thus creating better deals when trying to obtain news information. Why would businesses have their customers pay more when trying to purchase their product when the businesses in turn can just create online websites which are more efficient to get to and significantly less in cost for the public.
ReplyDeleteAccording to Silverblatt's Chapter from Media Literacy, he discusses the rise of citizen journalism movement where people currently are relying and obtaining news stories and feeds on blogs, cell phones, video cameras, etc. Thus in turn, this creates a different type of news media outlet where costs of producing and distributing the news will not cost as much as it does regularly to create print news and thus backing up more evidence on Natalie's statistics.
Also, according to Eric Alterman, at http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/03/31/080331fa_fact_alterman, newspapers used to operate in our nation as "high-margin monopolies." But now, since the internet age these same newspapers have created websites that do heavily profit from online advertising, but can still not nearly add up to loss of original circulation and print. As one can see, there is a common theme that is lined throughout all business which is profit gain and revenue services. For newspapers, they are losing money just trying to survive like old times.