THE FUTURE OF NEWSPAPERS

The Future of Newspapers in Digital World

The Future of Newspapers in Digital World

Introduction

The digital revolution and the expansion of technology have opened alternative ways for modifications and amendments in the methodologies through which traditional newspapers were governed. The purpose of this paper is to discuss the modern trends in the newspaper industry. This paper enlightens the modifications in the newspaper market and the threats that were brought in by those modifications. Nevertheless, the modifications in the newspaper industry have also created certain opportunities that can be grasped by the paper publishers. It can be realized that the technological expansion and the rise of digital systems have significant influence on the traditional newspapers. It can be summarized that this paper is aimed to focus on the future of newspapers and the industry in which they are regulated.

In this paper, the traditional and conventional target market of newspapers will be discussed in order to enlighten the impact of digital modernization on the conventional market of newspapers. Mobile and online versions of daily newspapers are experiencing a boom. These modernized trends pull audience and the company clientele from traditional paper-based publications (Tenopir, King, 2002, 311). The newspapers are not only sources of providing information to their target audience but also used as an advertising medium. Therefore, the technological modifications in the newspaper industry have shifted the advertising budgets of the corporate sector towards the digital sources of advertising.

In United Kingdom, the global trend has its own specifics; these specifics are parallel and interact freely with each other in the process. A study carried out on the online newspaper subscription in United Kingdom indicates that in the 2002, the number of online subscribers in the newspaper industry was no more than 1.1 billion. After three years, the number of online subscribers increased to 3.4 billion, and this figure increased by 2.7 billion in 2007. At the same time, the paper media continued to decline because it was considered obsolete and time consuming by its target market (Van, Nimwegen, 1998, 2). The traditional newspapers not only lost their target readers but the corporate clients that used to consider newspaper as an effective advertising medium.

Discussion and Analysis

History: Newspaper Industry

As the twentieth century began, newspapers reached a saturation point. There were more than twenty-two hundred daily newspapers in the country. Newspapers were facing a changing world and would not be considered as a dominant medium in the late 1800s. As the 1920s began, there was disillusionment with Democrats because of World War I, radio was about to become the contemporary prevailing medium (until television), and business was king (Algesheimer, Dholakia, Herrmann, 2005, 19). The silent film industry was flourishing; the magazines were becoming more sophisticated with quality colour printing. In addition, cities were growing larger (i.e., the mostly rural country was becoming a more urban country). Newspapers, at least many of them, adapted to the environment. The reaction was the creation of the tabloid. Compared to newspapers, tabloids were more visually pleasing, smaller, and more ...