600 million users are now on Facebook, and 24 billion newspapers are published every year.
One of these statistics will go up, and one will go down, without doubt.
You can no longer take a train journey without seeing an Iphone, smartphone, Ipad, Kindle, or laptop. In this new era, where every person seems to own some kind of smart electrical device, Apple is set to sell 1 million Ipads by the end of the year. An increase in portable technology is expected to increase the decline in the already decreasing sales of print. This year, it was the first time in its history, that the Sunday Times published a digital-only edition on 25th December, just proving this notion that we are now in a modern digital world. It's leaving newspapers and journalists no option but to embrace blogs, Twitter, and Facebook. In the 2009 'Internet in Britain' report, it showed that 49% of internet users had created a social networking profile. Most organisations have recognised this, and are devoting significant resources to social media and networks to drive their own sites. Yet its apparent that internet use does not seem to make enough money for the companies themselves. The Mail generated £16m from its website last year, out of £608m overall. To stop social media controlling news reporting, newspapers need strategies to keep readers and maintain sales, as in the last year, printed sales of daily broadsheets declined by 10%, and by 5% for daily tabloids.
Newspapers have lots of options available to them in terms of keeping print alive. They need to think of unique and different ways to report the news in order to regain readers, and more importantly, for the readers to stay loyal. With big stories, they could advertise it to the public that it will only be available in the newspaper, which doesn't seem apparent at the moment due to the fact that if a story is only going to appear in just one place, it'll surely just be the internet to provide this. By offering a cheaper price than originally, as proven by most things, this will no doubt draw in a bigger audience. The Independent's 20p newspaper seems to have become popular as well as successful.
Although, as much as people and organisations are scared of this new media world, they are still embracing it with open arms, seemingly giving up on print. Personally, I believe change is good. Digital news can offer much more depth, so stop being so frightened, quit complaining, or actually just do something about it.
