“There’s about half as many journalists employed in the United States as there were when the Berlin Wall came down… the newspaper industry is in a profound moment of business crisis.”
This quote by Nicco Mele in the podcast is what, in my opinion, is the best representation of the road journalism (or at least print) is heading down at the moment. While not all is doom and gloom, it’s undeniable that the internet is quickly changing what news outlets must do to be successful. In class, we’ve talked about different examples of both the cause and effect of these issues that some news media organizations face. Because of these issues, we’ve seen an innumerable amount of different journalistic companies make cuts to staff/pay, generate less money, and find themselves shifting towards more online content and presence. The biggest key and also the hardest challenge that these companies will always face is, obviously, how to stay economically viable while still maintaining their identity.
As the way people get news shifts more and more towards technological channels rather than the printed newspaper, the way that these papers generate money also changes. The fact that printed ads cost more than online ads for companies to run through the newspaper becomes void when the users who will see the commercials in the first place switch to getting their news from the internet.
The way an increasing amount of people get their news is not going to change back to print for the foreseeable future, so news media has to find other ways to stay economically viable. Three possible ways to counteract this problem are to charge more for ads, don’t let users run Adblock, and be conscious of the types of ads that are run.
The first solution, charging more for ads, is probably the least viable. If news outlets were all to simply upcharge companies who wanted a space on a page, they could lose potential partners and those companies may just find somewhere else to invest that money. However, I do think there’s something to be said about how online advertisements likely have higher customer engagement rates, as they can be personalized to be things that they care about. I can only speak for myself in this situation, but I know I’m much more likely to at least acknowledge online advertisements as compared to printed ones as they can take me right to a product and sell relevant things to me.
The second solution is to make sure that users who come on to your site either can’t browse while using an adblocker, or get a message requesting to disable it. As more people in the public learn of the trouble media companies are facing in trying to create revenue, I know of people that are willing to disable Adblock as they browse sites. While that’s certainly not the case for everyone, I think telling users that turning it off will help the site stay in business can go a long way.
Lastly, the type of ads sites run matter. While there’s no real right answer to this problem, I think types of trends can work better on a website than others. Native advertising is a type of marketing that both gives readers a very in-depth advertisement, while also keeping the appearance of the website more clean and professional looking. More specialized ads such as these can help create new revenue for news media, as companies will likely have to get more creative with ads instead of just throwing up a bunch of direct links ot products in the sidebars of a story page.
Matt Bryan's Reflections 