{"id":228,"date":"2001-04-03T00:46:55","date_gmt":"2001-04-03T05:46:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.jasonmorrison.net\/content\/?p=228"},"modified":"2008-08-17T01:13:16","modified_gmt":"2008-08-17T06:13:16","slug":"online-media-versus-traditional-print-media","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.jasonmorrison.net\/content\/2001\/online-media-versus-traditional-print-media\/","title":{"rendered":"Online media versus traditional print media"},"content":{"rendered":"

A response to Mass Media and Society<\/strong> (James Curran and Michael Gurevitch), Chapter 13<\/p>\n

In “Dead Trees to Live Wires,” Colin Sparks argues that the rise of online media poses commercial challenges to traditional print media.\u00a0 Sparks does not say that print is dead or dying, or that publishing print material online is some kind of bonanza.\u00a0 Instead he says there are four ways in which the internet has changed business for the news.<\/p>\n

The first change is in terms of competition.\u00a0 Newspapers historically do not have to compete with broadcast and magazine news because other media do not balance timeliness with depth the way daily papers do.\u00a0 Online, however, everyone is publishing 24 hours a day, so the local paper now has to directly compete with the local ABC affiliate and whoever else.\u00a0 Also, the net gets rid of geographical boundaries to competition and lowers the price of entry into publishing.\u00a0 Second, it allows advertisers to potentially bypass newspapers and talk directly to consumers and allows people looking for in depth news to go straight to the sources. \u00a0Third, this will lead to division between large national\/international news sites and small locally-concentrated news sites, with the local sites becoming much more involved in their communities.\u00a0 Finally, newspapers may respond to these pressures by breaking down the barriers between news\/editorial and advertising in order to compete.<\/p>\n

Sparks is right on, although he fails to consider a few key facets in how online news is going to develop.\u00a0 One is the cooperation of different media in online ventures.\u00a0 Few newspaper sites now compete with all the local network sites-most have one or two networks affiliated with them and many run joint news sites.\u00a0 This may have something to do with the concentration of ownership of different media even within the same city or it may just provide a competitive edge to both parties in a partnership.\u00a0 Another conflict he doesn’t touch on enough is the struggle between journalists and business people within online departments.\u00a0 Some papers have given it over to the business people, some have kept them separate, and others have let them duke it out.\u00a0 At Naples, we barely had contact with the business side of our department except to talk about new technologies coming in.\u00a0 All our people were journalists and the content and editorial decisions reflected that.\u00a0 Still, I’ve talked to people at other publications who feel controlled either by advertising interests or crap handed down from the corporate office.\u00a0 It seems, though, that individual editors and reporters can often make a big difference in how online news is produced and the corporate centralizing, advertising-based trend seems to be balanced by readers being more interested in real local news.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A response to Mass Media and Society (James Curran and Michael Gurevitch), Chapter 13 In “Dead Trees to Live Wires,” Colin Sparks argues that the rise of online media poses commercial challenges to traditional print media.\u00a0 Sparks does not say that print is dead or dying, or that publishing print material online is some kind […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,12],"tags":[367,66,68,355,57,378],"class_list":["post-228","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-academic-papers","category-writing","tag-advertising","tag-internet","tag-journalism","tag-mass-media","tag-online-journalism","tag-print-media"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jasonmorrison.net\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/228","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jasonmorrison.net\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jasonmorrison.net\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jasonmorrison.net\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jasonmorrison.net\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=228"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.jasonmorrison.net\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/228\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":230,"href":"http:\/\/www.jasonmorrison.net\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/228\/revisions\/230"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jasonmorrison.net\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=228"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jasonmorrison.net\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=228"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jasonmorrison.net\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=228"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}