Changing Times: How the Internet Will Help the Newspaper Industry



From this....



To this?...



Okay, so we, as Humans, are not so great with change.  Most of the time, it takes a looooooong time for change to come about.  Whether the change is societal, institutional, technological etc., we don't generally like change and we need a lot of convincing that the change is good for us, at least for the most part, in order for us to go along with it. (I remember when DVDs first came out and I thought they were ridiculous...true story.)  For this week's blog, I would like to focus primarily on a technological change that we are learning about this week: How the Internet is changing Journalism.  Specifically, I want to focus on the impact of the Web on print Newspapers.

What makes this agent of change, in this case I mean the Internet, different than most is the speed at which it facilitates change.  Technology is advancing at light speed and we are struggling to adapt to it.  The newspaper arena is a classic example of this.  Clay Shirky in his blog, Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable, suggests that the increased incorporation of news media from print to web is a "revolution" of sorts, similar to that of the invention of the printing press in the 1500's.  The Internet, much like the printing press of the 1500's, vastly altered the number of people who have access to news and other information.  The difference is that the Internet "revolution" allows information to be shared almost instantaneously and much more efficiently, allowing widespread change to happen almost overnight.  Shirky mentions that "Web use is a normal part of life for a majority of the developed world," so it only makes sense for newspapers to adapt to these changing times.  Shirky also explains that with the Internet, "the incredible difficulty, complexity, and expense of making something available to the public has stopped being a problem." 

So what is the problem then?  Why are we hearing horror stories of newspaper companies all over the nation going out of business by the hundreds?  Well, I think that the problem is drastically overstated but also that some newspaper companies are not adapting quickly enough to the rest of society.  Rick Edmonds notes in The News Media: An Annual Report on Journalism that "newspapers are not dying off in droves, only a half a dozen of any size went out of business" but he also warns that "far too many American papers are at risk of becoming insubstantial."  People want to be able to access their news at any time of day, from any location, on their cell phones, laptops and iPads, instead of paying for a bulky print newspaper.  Edmonds points out that "online sites of newspapers continued to add audience..and have become the locus of breaking news and offering web-native features like blogs, discussion chains and video."  This, to me, suggests that newspaper companies can survive in today's fast paced world just by paying attention to what their techno-savvy consumers want and then finding a way to give it to them-and it would seem that the Internet is just the tool for the job.