The decline in newspapers: MM case studies

The New Day
What was the New Day trying to achieve?
It was launched to tap into a new market, not specifically to take readers from other newspapers. It was designed to essentially embody modern lifestyles and meet the demands that audiences want from a newspaper. The paper was essentially trying to modernise newspapers and make it so that users would actually want to sit down and read a newspaper again.

List the key statistics on the first page: how many people buy newspapers in the UK? How has this declined in the last year?

• About 6million people buy a newspaper everyday 
• Over a million people have stopped buying newspapers in the last two years 

What audience were the New Day trying to attract?

The newspaper was targeted at both a male and female audience aged 35-55, it appeared more like a magazine to attract a more modern approach rather than appearing like a traditional newspaper. 

Why do you think the New Day failed so spectacularly? There are several possible reasons listed in the article but do develop your own opinion here as well.

The paper did not want to take any political approach but failed doing so by covering the EU referendum and immigration. There was a failure to invest in promotion and the cost of the paper rose from 25p to 50p making it more expensive than the 'i.' I think because the newspaper tried to modernise itself, appearing more like a magazine it makes it seem like the paper is attempting to be a magazine rather than the traditional newspaper, therefore it would not essentially target the 35-55 age bracket. Furthermore, a paper has to essentially take some sort of political approach in order to define itself and bring about specific audiences rather than 'everyone' as a reader wants to feel personally connected with the paper, holding similar ideologies. Therefore, I think the paper failed mainly due to the fact that it was trying to modernise itself to a large audience instead of being a specific newspaper holding specific ideologies that certain audiences would relate to.

The Guardian

List the key statistics on page 10: How many unique digital browsers used the Guardian website in June 2016? What are The Guardian's latest print sales figures? How does this compare to the Telegraph? In terms of finances, how much did the Guardian lose in 2015? 

• The website is the third most read in the world with over 120 million monthly unique browsers 
• On June 2016 a daily average of almost 9 million unique browsers, only about 1/3 from UK
• Feb 2016 - daily average of almost 9 million unique browsers way ahead of the Telegraph with 4 million
• In 2015 the Guardian lost £70 million this led to cutbacks of 20% 

What has been The Guardian's strategy for reversing this decline?

The Australia and USA Guardian did not receive cutbacks therefore are essentially the backbone of the newspaper. The Guardian has developed its ability to produce 24 hour rolling news coverage of major news events - therefore it changes the way audiences use the Guardian on mobile devices.

What global event did The Guardian's digital coverage win awards for?

The reporting on the Paris attacks won awards at the Press Awards 2015 - "the winner’s site offers a

comprehensive news service and boasts consistent innovation.It is notable for its superb live blogging, its long reads, the comment section and, in particular, fantastic coverage of the Paris shootings."

In your opinion, will the global website strategy be enough to save The Guardian?

I think that being able to access the Guardian on mobile devices and online definitely adds strength to the newspaper and the strategy does seem to be working for now, however I think audiences rely on social media more so than they do websites themselves to be accessing news stories. I think what makes the Guardian a newspaper that is still successful is the fact that it is a major brand and one that is known by the majority of individuals. In terms of profit and revenue I think advertisers will continue to advertise and promote themselves on the Guardian website simply due to the readership on the website itself, showing that it is still a newspaper that is valued by a vast amount of people.

Clay Shirky on news: don’t build a paywall around a public good

Why does Clay Shirky argue that 'accountability journalism' is so important and what example does he give of this?
Shirky's example is The Globes publication of the Catholic Church and the scandal. Its a classic example of the "iron core of journalism" and the "investigative journalism category," where three reporters were focused on a specific story for a long period of time unknown to whether it would pan out. He believes that the newspapers ability to produce accountability journalism is declining.

What does Shirky say about the relationship between newspapers and advertisers? Which
websites does he mention as having replaced major revenue-generators for newspapers (e.g. jobs, personal ads etc.)?

Advertisers were forced to overpay for the services they received as there weren't alternatives for display ads. The happy state of the 20th century newspapering was that advertisers were not only overcharged but also underserved. There was a time when Ford went to The New York Times during the rollover stories and said that they wanted to pull the Ford ads out of the newspaper to which the Times replied okay. The 'where else are you going to go' question allowed the newspaper not to suffer from commercial capture however this worked better for larger newspapers as their advertising revenue would be higher than those of a smaller newspaper. Advertising aids both the institution and the audience, however keeping the advertising with one institution is something that is going, therefore the protection is also going.

Shirky talks about the 'unbundling of content'. This means people are reading newspapers in a different way. How does he suggest audiences are consuming news stories in the digital age?
Shirky believes that the coherence of newspapers is not intellectual but industrial. What goes into print newspapers is content that produces commercial interest to the least interested user. "The aggregation of news has gone from being a server-side to a client-side operation" therefore the content bundled together is made by the consumer rather than the producer.The New York Times is being torn apart now as the online readership falls every year and this is due to users clicking on the stories directly from other sources such as Twitter or Facebook, rather than actually going to the Times' website and searching for the story. So the audience is now being swayed by other members of the audience rather than the newspaper producers.

Shirky also talks about the power of shareable media. How does he suggest the child abuse scandal with the Catholic Church may have been different if the internet had been widespread in 1992?
The Boston Globe report was reported by John Geoghan, the positive effects were not reported from the news report itself they were created by the papers initial audience. The Globe does not have a global readership of Catholics but instead is a regional paper but the millions of Catholics got the story from it being forwarded constantly. "The audience created the public, in fact, to use Starr's word for 'The Creation of the Media. The public created itself." The content was reused and republished on Google and sites that would generate interest such as the Bishop Accountability Project. In 1992 Paul Shanley was pulled in for having raped or molested almost a hundred boys, The Boston Globe covered this story again and ran 50 stories about priest abuse, however the story went no where. This shows how the internet has enabled the assembling of an audience to increase.

Why does Shirky argue against paywalls?
Shirky believes that news is a vital necessity, you cannot take that away from the reader and put it behind a paywall as there should be a public good of the accountability of journalism, however produced. News should be seen as a public good rather than a commercial operation.

What is a 'social good'? In what way is journalism a 'social good'?

A social good is where a group of people come together and do something for themselves - it links to social media as groups of people come together to share stories online. Open source software are examples of social good as there is no managerial culture to produce the product so sites like Wikileaks enable the audience to be in control. The internet essentially makes commercial models of journalism harder to sustain but public orders much easier to sustain, making social models easier.

Shirky says newspapers are in terminal decline. How does he suggest we can replace the important role in society newspapers play? What is the short-term danger to this solution that he describes?
Shirky believes that there will be a terminal decline in accountability journalism as the old models are breaking faster than the new models are able to replace. He believes that you could replace the models with smaller overlapping models of accountability journalism however he believes that we won't get it right in the beginning and the experiments may not pan out.

Look at the first question and answer regarding institutional power. Give us your own opinion: how important is it that major media brands such as the New York Times or the Guardian continue to stay in business and provide news?
Media institutions are able to sway audiences and meet political demands in terms of what is on their front page as audiences would be exposed to the front page story, getting easy coverage. It is important that major media brands such as the New York Times and the Guardian continue to stay in business solely because the quality of accountability journalism within a newspaper simply holds more value than that on a social networking website. I believe that a newspaper is able to bundle content to a degree where they can interest every possible audience; readers are able to be interested in at least one story and then be exposed to stories that are of commercial acknowledgement also, such as all-around important front page stories. I think if newspapers go out of business then the quality of news will decline as the public will essentially takeover and the idea of citizen journalism would become more prevalent, although this may seem like a positive thing due to the essentially 'rawness' of citizen journalism, it dismisses actual journalists, therefore putting them out of jobs and creating accountability journalism as something that is not left to the experts but merely something anyone can do. 

Week 7 - 'Twitter to focus on live events for 2017'

'Twitter to focus on live events for 2017'
http://www.campaignlive.co.uk/article/twitter-focus-live-events-2017/1412987

• Twitter wants to focus on live streaming of events to enhance its video efforts through its new TV Video app 
• Brands will be able to place customised 30 second mid roll ads during the stream 
• The app is also part of Twitter’s effort to promote more video content on the site following research by Cisco that claims 82% of Internet traffic will be video by 2019
  
• Nasr said the video content distributed or curated on Twitter would be user or brand generated content and ruled out becoming original content creators, like platforms such as BuzzFeed or AOL
  

I agree with the idea that videos are the way forward and a lot of content online will be mainly videos due to the fact that it is easier to watch videos and for audiences to view it on the go, rather than reading an article - it joins the visuals together and the audio to aid a user to efficiently get news content and stream events whilst on the go. I think this is a benefit for journalism too as users will be able to watch videos of live events or coverage on live events rather than reading about them, if this is also presented through Twitter it will allow the coverage of these events to go viral and global much quicker too.

Week 7 - 'Back to the future: were newspaper publishers wrong to go digital?'

'Back to the future: were newspaper publishers wrong to go digital?'
https://www.theguardian.com/media/greenslade/2016/oct/19/back-to-the-future-were-newspaper-publishers-wrong-to-go-digital

• “almost the entire newspaper industry got it wrong? What if, in the mad dash to put up editorial content on to the web, editors and publishers made a colossal business blunder that wasted hundreds of millions of dollars?”
• Chyi and Tenenboim studied the online readership of 51 leading US regional newspapers and compared 2011 online readerships with those in 2015 -  discovered that more than half of them had lost online readers in the course of the four years
• note that US newspaper industry digital advertising revenue increased from $3bn to only $3.5bn from 2010 to 2014
• print revenues plunged from $22.8bn to $16.4 bn over the same period, they still represented 82% of total newspaper revenue
• Chyi’s advice to publishers: accept that the days of 25-35% profit margins will never return and be happy with the 5% margins common in other companies. And charge for access to online content. Why? Because it invests the content with value

I think that making newspapers digital was an exceptionally good thing, however the idea of making this content 'free' is essentially the biggest problem. The fact that this generation believe that they are able to get free online content makes the value of news much less as it becomes less than a public good and more like a thing that is taken for granted and advantage of. If the content was to go behind a paywall initially then perhaps we would not take news for granted and traditional newspapers would hold more value, however now the content that we access comes more likely from secondary sources such as social networking sites, making the website itself decline with its readership.

Week 6 - 'Facebook bans 'offensive' Swedish breast cancer awareness video'

'Facebook bans 'offensive' Swedish breast cancer awareness video'
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/oct/20/facebook-bans-swedish-breast-cancer-awareness-video-for-being-offensive
Facebook have been slated by The Guardian for banning a video that focused on breast cancer awareness

• Cancerfonden said, “We find it incomprehensible and strange how one can perceive medical information as offensive" 
• Facebook took down the video believing that the video portrays images and themes that would be uncomfortable for a facebook audience 
• The charity disagreed with this and tried contacting facebook but were unsuccessful in their approach 

This article reveals how social networking sites and censorship has a huge part to play within the institution. Although this is a breast awareness charity trying to inform women about the effects of breast cancer, through the automated system of filtering and censorship it has been seen as something negative that needs removal. It almost poses the question of what is allowed to be on the internet because this video shows a naked female but it shows her in a way that informs others and is there as a representative symbol rather than something sexual. I think this makes it extremely difficult for institutions to decide what they can and can't publish on their sites. In this case however, I think this video is extremely powerful and should not have been removed, due to the impact of the theme and situation discussed. 

Week 6 - 'Jamie Woodruff 'hacked' Kim Kardashian – and he'll hack your company for a fee'

'Jamie Woodruff 'hacked' Kim Kardashian – and he'll hack your company for a fee'

http://www.wired.co.uk/article/jamie-woodruff-cybersecurity

The technical director of Metric Cloud ethically hacks into companies in order to discover their security weaknesses 

• 
  Woodruff first came into the public eye when he hacked Facebook for a student project
  He is now been hired to hack companies to find their security weaknesses
  He is a social engineer who "ethically hacks" companies
  
  
  This debate of ethics is one that clearly needs to be questioned as it acts as a complete oxymoron "ethical hacking." Hacking is far from ethical, in my opinion I believe that the invasion of someone's privacy is a violation of their own rights and personal information, therefore for companies to be doing this it makes us question how safe we are as individuals and mere civilians - if this man can hack into companies who have increasingly high protection implemented, how easy would it be for someone to hack into our lives and steal our information. In some ways this could be seen as a positive thing as it enables companies to higher their security systems and detect the flaws, however the companies that are being hacked will obviously be unaware of this hacking which makes it highly unethical and could unveil negative information that could potentially ruin an institution. 

Newspapers: the effect of online technology

Do you agree with James Murdoch that the BBC should not be allowed to provide free news online? Why?
I agree with Murdoch as I do believe that the quality of news is deteriorating. From a recent news story that I read from The Guardian, the story focused on how there has been a clear lack of journalism - the journalist Arlinghaus reports how he was live on air at a radio station and he saw that the radio host had just been reading the stories from the newspaper directly, without acknowledging the newspaper or the journalist. Thus, shows how the industry has become almost lazy as they just regurgitate information from other platforms. But in saying that, the BBC is funded by the license fee, therefore this idea of it being 'free' is one to question as in retrospect we are paying for the BBC to provide a public service. I think other news providers however, should make readers pay for their news online in order to higher the quality of journalism and provide stories that are actually worth the read instead of bad quality copycat journalism.

Was Rupert Murdoch right to put his news content (The Times, The Sunday Times) behind a paywall?

From the figures shown on the blog, it reveals how the number of digital subscriptions has increased and how putting news content behind a paywall has actually helped The Times and The Sunday Times. The Times got 13,000 new subscribers in the first half of 2013. However, despite this The Times is still losing money, however due to the company getting their profits from News Corp too, they have tolerated their losses. This shows that even though putting the content behind a paywall allows a short-term profitable income it does not allow for a sustainable income.

Choose two comments from below the Times paywall article - one that argues in favour of the paywall and one that argues against. Copy a quote from each and explain which YOU agree with and why.

Why do you think the Evening Standard has bucked the trend and increased circulation and profit in the last two years?

It is estimated by the National Readership Survey, has fallen 13 percent on average compared to the previous year, with particularly bad results for the Independent, Daily Mirror and Guardian.The Evening Standard produced more newspapers than other institutions, filling the gap in the market producing 900,000 copies daily rather than 700,000. This therefore increased the circulation as the rest of the newspaper industries printed less in order to meet other demands. 

Is there any hope for the newspaper industry or will it eventually die out? Provide a detailed response to this question explaining and justifying your opinion.
I do not think the newspaper industry will die out in the near future as I believe that newspapers are traditional media that are valued by a lot of individuals, especially the elder generation. I think that being able to sell the newspapers directly to audiences would enable the industry to stay alive and I think that by making online content not free it will allow the newspaper industry to gain more recognition as it would be on the same wavelength as paid for news online. The quality of journalism within a newspaper is usually of a higher standard due to the vast and strenuous editing process that they undergo, therefore the value of the newspaper should not go unrecognised and audiences should realise that these papers hold much more significance and importance as instant news. However, in a generation where everything is instant, it poses a really big issue for the newspaper industry as younger audiences would prefer to have rapid, accessibly news and follow the trends of this. I personally think the industry will not die out in the near future but it is definitely struggling and will continue to struggle if online content does not go behind a paywall.