ovelha negra

In a time when information is available to everyone just by  pushing a button or clicking a  mouse, newspapers have had to adapt in order to survive. Due to the continuing change of technology, of preferences in society, newspapers have taken different roles in order to continue their existence. Nowadays, because of the economic crisis, newspapers are going out of business at an unprecedented rate, and the survivors are slashing their budgets. Thousands of reporters and editors have lost their jobs. No print publication is immune, including the mighty New York Times. As analyst Allan Mutter noted, 2008 was the worst year in history for newspaper publishers, with shares dropping a stunning 83 percent on average. Newspapers lost $64.5 billion in market value in 12 months. Will the crisis that we are all facing be the end of the traditional newspaper? As far as I’m concerned, in a few years, more and more newspapers and press agencies will collapse, and the online versions will continue to exist. It’s just a matter of time for the Internet to “swallow” the media as we know it.

To begin with, specialists say that all traditional media is in danger, but that newspapers are the most threatened because of the diminishing interest in them. For young people, newspapers stand for a vanishing era, and they prefer the Internet. In my opinion, the online version of a newspaper is much more easier to be accessed by everyone, and it is also cheaper.

What is really threatened by the decline of newspapers and the related rise of online media is reporting. What will happen with all those people who go everywhere and talk to everyone in order to get the information? If newspapers die, so does reporting, at least that is what the specialists predict . Their explanation is the following:  because the majority of reporting originates at newspapers. According to them, online journalism is essentially parasitic. Former Los Angeles Times editor John Carroll has estimated that 80 percent of all online news originates in print.

Furthermore, while newspapers are collapsing, blogs, sites and other ways of getting information are expanding like never before. Nowadays, every journalist or wannabe journalist has a blog. The fact is that these people have gained, because of the things that they write on their personal sites, a lot of credibility and a lot more power than writing a feature in a newspaper. I think this happens because of the accessibility of the Internet, of the endless possibilities that come with it.

In addition, the demographics tell the story. The vast majority of newspaper readers are middle-age people. The interest in printed versions is decreasing more and more.

However, most people think that most major papers have sturdy online presence already, so they should be able to make the transition in the immediate future quite nicely. Most people do not realize the implications of such a thing, of people losing their jobs, because developing an online publication does not require a lot o people.

In conclusion, some people go very far in saying that the death of newspapers will be the death of journalism, and more than that, the death of civilization. Others celebrate the power of the Internet and the never ending evolution of technology. What will happen in the end?Only time will tell. I reiterate the fact that I believe that the newspaper will vanish into thin air eventually. It is just a matter of time.

Raluca