User:Samanthayukb/Sandbox

Topic: Newspapers to stay alive are pursuing non-traditional sources of revenue such as wine clubs and online dating service.

Introduction

Economic pressures are the primary forces that shape the behaviour of newspaper companies. In order to survive in the digital age, some responses of newspaper managers are affecting journalistic quality, producing practices that diminish the social value of newspaper content and divert the attention of newspaper personnel from journalism to activities that are to the business interests of the press. The newspapers operate in a mature industry with little growth potential. The current situation as the newspaper industry faces is an uncertain future because of stagnant markets; that is the increasing competition from other media that caught the audience attention, used by progressively smaller portions of the population and changed the advertiser media choices. These trends have been developing for two decades. Publishers are convinced that the industry has to be managed differently in order to survive and thus, have adopted a range of strategies that have further commercialized the industry, making commercial considerations that exceed the importance of editorial quality or social concerns.

Traditionally, newspaper enterprises were own privately by individuals who operated his/her publication with public interest and community service orientation. In order to survive for sufficient fund to normally operate the publication, many newspaper enterprises are affected by pressures to maximize profit and company values, change in business cycles, rise and fall interest rates, share price changes for public companies, create structured relations with owners of capital, workers and suppliers, pay for facilities and equipment, and engage in the creation production, marketing and distribution of papers. These changes have resulted new objectives to the media managers and emerged emphases placed on profits and share prices with companies in recent years. It allowed stronger elements of capitalism and commercialism to become the major factors determining operations and content in major media companies.

“The primary content of newspaper today is commercialized news and features designed to appeal to broad audiences, to entertain to be cost effective and to maintain readers whose attention can be sold to advertisers.” In the modern newspaper business model began to focus on urbanization, wage earning and expand literacy to create social conditions. To obtain that, newspaper began to seek larger audiences by reducing the price for papers, altering content to appeal to a mass audience and shifting costs to retail advertisers that developed with the changes in economic and social life. As a result, the survival of newspaper is very much dependent on commercialism, where newspaper companies have made specific efforts to acquire or launch news and feature services to gain additional commercial advantage from the content that they do not produce, as well as to achieve additional income through this channel.

Robert G. Picard:Commercialism and Newspaper Quality

This article explores how commercialism has diminished the importance of public service. Market concerns and economic pressures now determine operation and content in the newspaper industry. This situtation has promoted self-interest behaviour aimed at market potential and a growing conflict between the role of newspapers as “servants of readers” and the exploitation of readers to seek additional commercial gain. The public increasingly sees the newspaper industry becoming a business that is more concerned with its own economic interests than with its original purpose.

The content of today’s newspaper is shifted by commercialism, and the market conditions in the media firms. This results a diminution of newspaper quality and diversity as commercial media emphasize content that serve broad audiences and will not lead to reduction in advertisers as well.

The Economist: Making news pay: Reinventing the newspaper

An example of an American newspaper named The New York Sun. With mixture of crime reports and human-interest stories, the Sun was intended to appeal to a mass audience with cheap price at one penny, one-sixth the price of most other papers. This daily newspaper was selling 15,000 copies a day. The Sun introduced a new business model to the industry: it has a large circulation that attracts advertisers, where the result revenue enables the company to keep the price down and circulation up. It appears to be a great deal for all concerns: readers got their news cheap; advertisers could reach a large audience easily; and newspaper could afford to employ professional reporters.

This model has worked very well before the audiences have shifted to another media, the Internet. “The audience is bigger than ever, if you include all platforms”. News providers throughout are outreaching for new models to survive. Some are starting to charge for content on the web and mobile devices such as pursuing non-traditional sources of revenue such as wine clubs or dating services. It is uncertain that if these models will work; however, it is clear that revenue from online advertising alone will not be enough to cover the costs of running a traditional news organization. Online advertising usually brings in less than 20% of a newspaper’s advertising revenue. Advertisers can measure the effectiveness of advertisements and make negotiation on the payment. Some argued that Internet advertising would become as valuable as it becomes more targeted. Even though the revenue on online advertisement is growing, it is still not fast enough to fill the gap of decline in revenue from print advertising and circulation. The strategies of metered paywalls and charges for mobile devices have been very doubtful in terms of attraction.

As a matter of fact, some newspapers prefer to generate revenue by incorporating more “lifestyle” element to attract the attention of the audiences. For example, newspapers can use their trusted brands to earn new forms of revenue, such as the New York Times and Britain’s Daily Telegraph, have launched wine clubs; Canada’s Globe and Mail offers branded cruises and so on. Non-traditional sources of revenue are seemed to be more convincing in today’s newspaper industry in order to survive the business.

Outline

In my essay, I will reference from the two articles “Commercialism and Newspaper Quality” by Robert Picard and “Making news pay: Reinventing the newspaper” by The Economist. I will be exploring topics such as commercialism on today’s newspaper, the comparison of online and traditional advertising and non-traditional sources of revenue. I agreed to the assigned topic where newspapers are pursuing non-traditional sources of revenue to survive. The above articles are supporting my thesis: the first source supports the content of today’s newspaper are nominated with commercialism, which diminished the importance of public interest; the second source gives examples of survival strategies in the newspaper business, one of the examples relates to the assigned topic: non-tradition source of revenue. I will explore more sources to support my thesis in the second draft.

Reference

The Economist (2011, July 11). Making news pay:Reinventing the newspaper. The Economist, 400(8741), 7. Retrieved from [1]

Picard, R. (2004). Commercialism and newspaper quality. Newspaper Research Journal, 25(1), 54-65.

Samanthayukb (talk) 17:35, 24 October 2011 (UTC)