The impact of technological change on newspapers

The Impact Of Technological Change On Newspapers

Task: 

1. Look at all of the UK news titles and research how the paywall is being used in an attempt to protect revenue and profits for these companies.

2. How do newspapers prompt readers to interact with their online news? Consider how they use social media to encourage reader participation.

3. Consider how you could apply Shirky's End of Audience Theories to online news products.

Publish your findings on to your blog.  

Technological change has seen newspaper readership decline, as audiences move towards reading news and current affairs via the internet. Rising printing and paper costs have pushed traditional news journalism to adapt. A newspaper titles offer a news product using the internet platform. These online newspapers mean less revenue because people do not need to pay to read information. To cope with this many titles have introduced a paywall (a way of charging audiences to read their content).

 The Guardian uses a paywall.The news platform asks for a £5 monthly fee to contribute however this is not compulsory. They allow you to subscribe to their website in order to 'fund and support The Guardians journalism' and therefore helps increase revenue. The Guardian also asks for generosity of its consumers. Because the paywall is not compulsory they ask their audiences to donate £1 to support The Guardian, this is also compulsory, but again thus gets fund the paper. The Guardian does not make their paywall compulsory because they want to 'keep their journalism as open as they can'.

It is possible to apply Shirky's End of Audience Theory with these online news websites and platforms as the consumers decide what news they want they want to view based on subscriptions. According to Shirky's End of Audience Theory behavior can vary across social media sites. An example of this is if someone is subscribed to a particular newspaper platform but another news story occurs from a different newspaper platform and is broadcasted and shared by peers, consumers are directed to read the story opposed to any other as it is available on another site, providing that the consumer becomes decisive and behavior is less predictable.