Tuesday, March 10, 2009

Future of the news – Paper or Internet?

By Christopher Gourgouras
News writing should remain balanced between Internet and print. This is because if one side dominates the market they will also have control over pricing and what gets written. If an even balance is kept than there will be competitive prices and more interesting stories from both sides.

Right now print news isn’t doing too well due to the fact that the economy is bad. Fewer companies are paying to advertise in the paper because of sites like craigslist that make advertising free and other companies just can’t afford to hire. The newspapers are also having subscriber problems because not as many people are reading the newspaper daily anymore and those who do are discovering you can get the same information for free online. What newspapers need to do to fix this is give consumers a reason to subscribe such as subscriber benefits such as more coupons or a yearly/monthly subscriber event such as a raffle. A lot of people buy the Sunday paper because it has a coupon section.

Print news also has to cut back on costs, this is because paper costs a lot of money but if they found a way to recycle old newspapers and create new ones they could make more money and spend less. They also need to lower advertising prices so more companies will see newspapers as an affordable method of getting the word out about their business.

Online news will do fine unless the Internet goes down for more than a month around the world. This is because online news sites do not need subscribers; they are paid for by ad companies who put ads on their sites such as Google. They have a large supply of talented writers from around the world as well and many write for free on these sites.

As long as a balance is kept the news industry will do fine. Competition is good for this type of industry and without it the news would be boring.

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