Internet & Digital Technology: Impact upon News Organisations
TV Radio
Papers News
Figure 1: Venn Diagram of Distinct News Platforms Although this module focusses upon the impact of the Internet and digital technology upon the news media it was noted in the classroom session (and accompanying PowerPoint) that the technology used to capture and dsitrubte news has changed over the years but the widespread adoption of digital technology, combined with the Internet, has had a major and rapid impact. In order to get students to reflect upon the nature of news mediated by technology a simplifed model was adopted for the purposes of discussion and introducing some key concepts. This was done using a worksheet and classroom exercises to think about the differnet characteristscs of three news platforms; radio, television and newspapers. The physical characteristics of these services were considered and then compared to the possibilities offered by the adoption of digital technologies; for instance radio offers audio, televsion audio and video but not not in-depth text, and newspapers offer text but not audio or video. All offer some degree of interaction but by some relatively slow means of communication and only partly ashychrnous. However add in the Internet and world Wide to the mix and suddenly all of these platforms acquire new characteristics if only as as an extension to their exiting ones (ses Figure 2 on next page). The majority of news media organisations now have some kind of prsence on the World Wide Web and this gives them, whatever the origins and characteristics of their original platform, the ability to communicate with a global audience (potentially) and to use audio and video (multimedia). This opens up lots of new possibilites for how news is gathered and dissmeminated but it also brings with it other problems such as maintining revenues in the face of so many alternative sources of news. A distinctive feature of “news on the web� is that it is very largely free to consume. Some organisations have revenue fro m other channels such as the cover price of printed verions of newspapers, or the advertising revenues from braodcast radio and television, which can be used to cross-subsidise the production of web based news services. The increasing use of smart phones has also lead to a rapid growth in the mobile consumption of news via browsers or designated Apps. 1
Radio (Audio)
Internet & WWW Facilitates Communications & Multimedia Television
Newspapers Text + still images but no audio or video
Audio & Video
Figure 2: Imapct of Internet and World Wide Web on Media Platforms Given that the demand for news via the World Wide Web would appear to be highly price elastic (not surprising given the large number of easily available substitute “goods”) most news is free and cross-subsidisation is one option (as mentioned above) but if revenues from the paid for channels fall this becomes increasginly untenable, for instance as readers stop buying newspapers but read them online instead. Whilst news organisations sometimes re-purpsoe materials for use in more than one media they sometimes reserve some material for exclusive use on a particular channel. So some content may only appear in the paid for newspaper (but not on the web version) but some material may only appear on the web (and why not since the “long tail” permits this to happen) and here the new providers obtain revenues from advertising on the web sites (see Figure3).
News Contents
Newspaper Only
Web Only
Figure 3: Use of shared and exclusive contents across platforms.
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In terms of the module elearning (does dropping the hyphenated version signify growing acceptance and usage of the phrase?) fits in nicely with some of the other sessions since elearning makes heavy use of the kinds of tools and services discussed in the Computer Mediated Communications (CMC) session and the Web 2.0 session, since many students and educators make use of social networing sites and services like Flickr and YouTube. (see Figure 2).
elearning
CMC
Web 2.0
Figure 2: Relationship between elearning, CMC and Web 2.0 sessions. There are many articles about the music industry, movie industry and issues around technology, copyright, piracy and intellectual property tagged on Delicious and postings on the module blog, which are both searchable (See Figure 4). Module Blog
=http://phil-wane-ics.blogspot.com/
Phil on Delicious
= http://www.delicious.com/Moonglum
Figure 4: Blog and Delicious Services
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Key Economic Concepts As economists it would be really useful to be able to link some instances of theory to practice. Key economic terms and phrases one might associate with this topic (not exhaustive) are: Economies of scale, disintermediation, net profits, Return on Investment (ROI), Supply and Demand, Long Tail, marginal utility, marginal cost and (with increasing fees) price elasticity of demand (PED).
Some Useful supporting Links (from 2012 Lecture PowerPoint)
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MediaShift blog
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Nieman Journalism Lab
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The Guardian Media Section
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The Guardian (mobile apps)
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BBC News
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BBC College of Journalism
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BBC Radio 4’s The Media Show
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The Independent subscription page
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The Times (mobiles apps & social media)
(These are clickable links on the electronic version on NOW).
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