Final Exam Question - Josh Wiegand
By Joshua Wiegand
The newspaper industry has changed quite a lot since the early days of America. Even before America began people like James Franklin (Ben Franklin’s brother) were producing newspapers that were critical of the government in England. The newspapers were only two to four pages in length and contained an assortment of small current news items for people to read.
Today, newspapers hold as one of the largest media industries in the United States. They are in competition with television, and especially the Internet. Newspaper outlets like The New York Times or the largest Baltimore newspaper The Baltimore Sun are producing newspapers daily that are all nearly triple the length that they once were in early America. Also, almost every town in America has a newspaper specifically for their town unlike in early America where one large city would be lucky to have a newspaper.
Newspapers like The Baltimore Sun have converged on many fronts. So of the most notable would be the advertising that goes into financing their newspaper and the articles that are included in the newspaper. For example, if you were to go right now to The Baltimore Sun’s website and look at the article on the front page, these same articles you would be able to find in either today or tomorrow’s printer paper copy of the newspaper. This is how newspapers are converging, through the use of the Internet. This is something that in many ways is killing off newspaper companies. Another convergence of the newspapers is to social media, Facebook, Twitter, and the recently release Google+ all have Facebook pages, Twitter accounts and Google Business pages today or if they do not will have them very soon. This allows newspapers to advertise their newspaper on the every expanding social media landscape.
The business model has changed in a few fundamental ways. The first example is that now people do not really pay to put an advertisement in the newspaper for a yard sale or any other classified ad. Instead this is all done over the use of the Internet. Newspapers cannot rely on people paying for newspaper ads anymore because the Internet is more accessible with a larger beneath of information than any newspaper company can supply. So now instead the newspapers pay the bills with lots of online advertisements and lots of printed advertisements. This can be seen again on the front page of any newspapers company’s website and throughout the articles in their website.
Finally, newspapers use all the tools available to them. These tools are Facebook, Twitter, and the many other social media websites. Consumers see these websites as fun, interactive websites while newspapers use these websites to push their newspapers and articles so that the number of hits on their website go up. Therefore they receive more money from advertisers. All of the uses and inclusions into the social media by newspapers is simply to advertise, promote, and finally sell a newspaper. The objective is to create a name and have people understand that The Baltimore Sun or any other newspaper is the place to go for news.
