Newspaper Exam Question

There are multiple reasons why newspaper sales have declined. One of the main reason is the rise in the use of technology and where all newspapers are now accessible on the internet. With the drastic rise in technology and the internet, majority of newspaper companies such as The Guardian and The Daily Mail have posted all their daily papers on their sites along with the front page being posted on the BBC site. This makes all newspapers easily accessible and also more convenient. All readers can now access them whenever they want by just simply going on the internet and searching up the papers online without having to leave and buy it from a shop. Although it is cheaper for yourself to access the papers as you don’t have to actually purchase each daily paper, all paper companies ask for readers to subscribe to their paper in order for them to be able to continue business and publish new papers every day. This could also give their subscribers perks that them and only them would be able to access and use.

Having the internet as your main news source is a positive. This is because all readers can comment on various articles and have conversations with other readers online to gain more opinions on the specific article so they can get see the views of other people and change their opinion if they are persuaded. Although this can occasionally start arguments on different opinions, people do find this very useful and informative to understand the full picture. However, using the internet to access your daily news does have its negatives and reading a newspaper has some positives over it. These negatives include requiring an internet connection in order to access your the papers that you normally read, losing stories due to more recent stories overwriting them, more information is given by print newspapers and if a users reads online newspapers too much it could cause eye strain. The biggest negative for the rise in online newspapers is that the biggest age for reading newspapers is the elderly. Due to the elderly not well advanced with technology, they still prefer reading physical print newspapers compared to our online copies. But because the amount of print papers decreasing by the year, elderly cannot read their newspapers they have read all the time with physical copies. So, all newspaper companies are slowly losing their audience due to this change.

Citizen Journalism has made the mass media affect the traditional way for reporting and understanding news because of the audience reacting different to stories. For example, when there is a violent outbreak in a country, news stories over the internet had an outbreak over the comment and reported making fun and lying over the stories told. This brought controversy over whether or not information given by the general public was necessary because of these sensitive areas being derided.

According to studies, The Daily Mail had a decrease of 55% of print papers sold during 2000 since 1960. In comparison, online newspapers, which were first introduced in 2000, have been preferred by 55% of the public, that stated they prefer reading the daily news online rather than a print.