The Newspaper Industry
Read the following information and answer these questions
What are the reasons that newspaper circulation is in decline ?
What has been the response of The Times and other newspapers to try and maintain profits and audiences ?
British newspapers are an important and well established part of British culture. They are responsible for informing the public of regional, national and global news, as well as helping to shape and influence public opinion on important social, moral and political issues. National newspapers are distributed throughout the country and can be divided into three genres:
Tabloids (red-tops): The Sun; The Star; The Sport and The Daily Mirror.
Mid-Range Tabloids (black-tops): The Daily Mail and The Daily Express.
Broadsheets: The Times; The Guardian; The Independent and The Daily Telegraph
Newspapers are owned by individuals with their own political and social agendas and these ideologies are reflected in the editorial content of the papers
Newspapers: In Decline
One major contemporary media debate is the changing landscape of newspaper production and consumption. Newspaper institutions are in competition with one another to ensure they have enough people consuming their products so that they can make money from advertising to safeguard their survival. However, it is becoming increasingly difficult for paper-based news forms to compete with the rise in e-media news services.
Over the last decade, the UK’s daily newspapers have lost some 2.25 million readers. Falling circulations mean less money through the till and newspapers’ other main source of income, advertising, is also drying up. In the last 10 years, advertising revenues have fallen by about 20%. In the struggle to stay profitable, newspaper companies are cutting staff, closing offices and, in the case of local papers, getting rid of titles. Some within the industry predict that within the next 10 years we could even see one or two of Britain’s biggest daily newspapers close.
Why is the Newspaper Industry in Crisis?
Newspapers are currently ‘managing a decline’ (Greenslade: The Guardian). But why has this happened? Some of the reasons have to do with the way the newspaper institutions reacted to changes in technology, namely the internet. The last few years have witnessed a revolution in how industries deal with news and how audiences access it. 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 comment. According to Sull, who writes a blog for the Financial Times, there are five reasons why the newspaper industry is in a deeper crisis than it should be.
1. Ignoring Signs of Change
Since the early 1980s, institutions have been able to access real time news through networks. This was more than a decade before the Internet took off. Most newspaper executives ignored these early signs of changes in news gathering techniques.
2. Dismissing unconventional competitors
Newspapers ignored a steady stream of innovations that they might have imitated to enhance their own business model, e.g. distributing news through multiple media (terminals, television, Internet, and periodicals)
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, and in many cases 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. So, there are many reasons why the newspaper industry finds itself in a transitional period which is calling into question the nature of the production and reception of news. At the heart of this debate is the idea that in the future most news with be either accessed via broadcast or e-media platforms.
Most news institutions have been slow to embrace the web but are now using the platform to target audiences, but it is proving harder to make profits from online publishing than from old-fashioned printed forms. With so many free news sites to choose from, audiences are not prepared to pay money to read newspapers online. That means that they have to rely on web-based adverts to generate income. But it is not straight-forward as online advertisers have many more spaces to choose from and there is less certainty in terms of who will see these adverts, making the market more complex
Should News be Free?
James Murdoch of NewsCorp has been critical of free news provision online, in particular he states the BBC and its “expansion of state-sponsored journalism is a threat to the plurality and independence of news provision,” he also said the scope of the BBC’s activities and ambitions was “chilling” and 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. “It is essential for the future of independent digital journalism that a fair price can be charged for news to people who value it.” Essentially, NewsCorp are driven by the need to make money whereas the BBC, a Public Service Broadcaster, is less governed by the economic imperative because they are funded predominantly by the revenue generated by the television license. News Corporation has said it will start charging 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.
"The world is changing and newspapers have to adapt" Rupert Murdoch, NewsCorp.
The internet has made it easier than ever for audiences to find news. At the click of a button, they can catch up on the latest stories in whatever form they choose - text, audio or video. Rupert Murdoch, chairman of NewsCorp states: ‘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.’
