With the advancement of technology, the trend of print media is falling behind. Many
newspapers are under pressure to fall as electronic and digital advertising and news channels
are in their way of struggle to fill the gap. “A good newspaper , I suppose, is a nation talking
to itself,” (Arthur Miller, 1961). News paper is becoming extinct or one can say endangered.
The trends have changed since the second half of the twentieth century, at first television then computers and then internet. The ways through which people used to get news have transformed. Even at the end of the century news paper used to be major source for people to get news. Newspaper was still a source of handsome profit for the organization of professional reporters and editors in print media. It all changed with the evolution of accelerating technology that has transformed the trend of the newspaper business in America. The future of the newspaper paper business has an uncertain future that very well may not survive much longer.
These are painful words to write for someone who spent 50 years as a reporter and editor at The Washington Post. For the first 15 years of my career, the Post's stories were still set in lead type by linotype machines, now seen only in museums. We first began writing on computers in the late 1970s, which seemed like an unequivocally good thing until the rise of the Internet in the 1990s. Then, gradually, the ground began to shift beneath us. By the time I retired earlier this year, the Graham family had sold the Post to Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, for $250 million, a small fraction of its worth just a few years before. Donald
Graham, the chief executive at the time, admitted that he did not know how to save the newspaper. (Robert G. Kaiser, The Bad news for The News, The News.16 Oct, 2014)
The owners of the conventional news media were so bewildered with the advent of the internet that for the sake of earning a little more profit they started to sell their news online. However no one knew at that time that such a marked decline in the business would be caused. Therefore many news media outlets sold their control over their product this way. Many paper news media outlets troubled their existence in that way, Newsweek magazine failed, and Time magazine is wavering. The regional newspapers are in despair of their survival. Paper news media, overall, has been devastated not only in the aspects of advertising but also economically. The news world has been overtaken by Google and Facebook, which is becoming a scale game for the advertisers. Advertisers spend lavishly in just a handful of media while smaller, niche websites are obliged to try paywalls and seek out other sources of revenue.
Digital display advertising has become so ubiquitous that its value keeps dropping. Print advertising still pays the bills, but for how much longer? The Internet has shifted the balance of power from publishers to advertisers, who can reach their customers far more efficiently than they could by taking a shot in the dark on expensive print ads. The result, according to the Newspaper Association of America (as reported by the Pew Research Centre), is that print ad revenues have fallen from $44.9 billion in 2003 to just $16.4 billion in 2014, while digital ad revenues—$3.5 billion in 2014—have barely budged since 2006. As the newspaper business is besieging the walls are shrinking and oxygen is being pumped out, the survival of newspaper is endangered. The concept of journalism has changed, now you will find anyone
writing blogs and articles online, giving false opinions and false news. In addition, a new force of “citizen” journalists and bloggers is itching to hold politicians to account. The web has opened the closed world of professional editors and reporters to anyone with a keyboard and an internet connection. Several companies have been chastened by amateur postings—of flames erupting from Dell's laptops or of cable-TV repairmen asleep on the sofa. Each blogger is capable of bias and slander, but, taken as a group, bloggers offer the searcher after truth boundless material to chew over. Of course, the internet panders to closed minds; but so has much of the press. The issue, that newspaper is dying doesn’t just arise because the business is in decline, it arises basically because with the fall of newspaper journalism is being turned down. Clay Shirky, who writes about digital culture, once said, “Society doesn’t need newspapers. What we need is journalism.” Newspaper have been so important and integral part of the routine life of the America’s political, and cultural and business matters that with the beginning of the internet era the survival is now in doubt of the paper media. More than any other medium, newspapers have been our eyes on the state, our check on private abuses, our civic alarm systems. The newspaper world is so towards reprobation and rejection that day by day not only its number of pages are shrinking but also the coverage of the news and the content is also become less. The problem is that with the emergence of technology and internet the gem of news, journalism, is on the verge to diminish. The voids left by newspaper are, no matter, filled by online news media by the soul spirit of journalism is fading. Their troubles are of their own making and of little consequences to general welfare. Despite all the development of other media, the fact is that newspapers in recent years have
continued to field the majority of reporters and to produce most of the original news stories in cities across the country.
The revenues generated by the online readers are still less than the revenues mad by that of the print news readers. This is because although many online newspaper offer free reading content, still fewer pages are read and looked by the online readers, which makes online news less worthy. Gavin O'Reilly, president of the World Association of Newspapers in Paris, says that print readers are much more valuable than online readers, who use newspaper websites in a “haphazard and fragmented way”. Still newspaper websites have higher profits margins than print does because they have no newsprint or distribution to pay for. “If visitors come from Google to stories deep in the paper and then leave,” explains Mr Munck, “Google gets the dollars and we get only cents, but if we can bring them in through the front page we can charge €19,000 [$25,000] for a 24-hour banner ad.” In spite of this, most newspapers still depend on news aggregators.The problem is that newspapers, where they are putting efforts online to make news worthwhile for the readers, it is slowly towards decline in its print form. Selling online is not enough, it’s the journalism. The reality is that resources for journalism are now disappearing from the old media faster than new media can develop them. The financial crisis of the press may thereby compound the media's crisis of legitimacy. Moreover the fact that people are turning towards internet news is that they are less interested in reading international affairs and foreign matters. They want to read about the ways of improving life, short stories, local reports, sports, weather, and entertainment. For this the trend of journalism has to change, instead of putting long pieces and long articles on international affairs, the
journalists and the newspaper companies must understand that what content is liked and more read by the readers. This has even changed the style of many journalists and the news paper
agencies, many of them are working on it, trying to make print news more reader friendly and adventurous. Also the newspaper companies will have to become more commercial for the sake of interest from business people.
One of the reasons of the extinction of the newspaper could be the integrity of the government. In 2003 in The Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization, Alicia Adsera, Carles Boix, and Mark Payne examine the relationship between corruption and "free circulation of daily newspapers per person". Using different methods they indicated that the lower the newspaper circulation is the greater the corruption is because government matters are less publicized and open to people in this way. Over the next few decades half the rich world's general papers may fold. Jobs are already disappearing. According to the Newspaper Association of America, the number of people employed in the industry fell by 18% between 1990 and 2004. To avoid, this murder of the newspaper world, and the custom of decades. The print media companies need to change their ways like many, which are trying to attract young population. Young population is as more attracted towards subjects like entertainment, sports, lifestyle and politics hence, such news shall be added both online and offline to balance the online and print news media.
Decline of newspaper is because people have shunned reading newspapers and newspaper has shunned people by stopping to provide what is the will of the masses. Despite of the efforts of past two decades still, no ways have yet been figured out on how to make traditional news-gaining ways more profitable to make it survive long. To prevent the death
of print news media the owners need to take it seriously and think in more liberal and versatile ways. They need to take responsibility to set goals as news provider source, and also
need to invest a fair amount of money to accomplish the mission, in order to regain the golden value of print news, lost decades before. The renaissance of the actual and luxurious journalism, providing responsible and informative news can however salvage the lost worth of the Newspaper.