Monday, October 24, 2011

Newspaper industry, learning to adapt

              In the article “Newspaper Website Audiences Up 20 Percent in Past Year. Online advertising increases too,” it shows how an industry must learn how to adapt to new times.  I have been to conferences about how the newspaper industry is failing because people are now getting their information via internet.  Newspaper publishers are now learning to adapt by utilizing what their target audience wants. 
                Today’s society is becoming very technological.  The newspaper industry has started using websites to post stories and the traffic on these websites has increased 20 percent in the past year.  This is a good way to show how things change quickly and to keep up with the competition one needs to see what the target audience wants and then adapt to it.  Research has shown that there is a monthly view of 110.4 million unique visitors.  This number is about 64 percept of all Internet users over the age of 18.
                Since newspaper websites have grown, so has advertising online.  When looking at newspaper advertising dollars, 14 percent make up web advertising through only the first half of 2011 whereas last year was 12 percent for the same time frame. 
                Everyone must change with the times and I think that it is a good idea to start including newspaper websites because physical newspapers are starting to become obsolete with the Internet so readily available.  The newspaper industry needs to search for new and creative ways to get their stories out into the public and I believe they are doing a good job by utilizing the Internet and the numbers are proving it.  I believe that many companies can learn a lot from this.  It is important to constantly be looking at what the target audience wants.  It is always changing and this is a major change for the newspaper industry.  Some other companies may not realize that things are changing until it is too late and their numbers are too far down. 

3 comments:

  1. Although the use of the internet to read the newspaper has increased, I still think that there is a market for those that do read the newspaper. Even so, as Becky mentioned, it's important for businesses to embrace advertising via the internet, especially because the numbers show that views are increasing. One aspect they may want to consider, is even though someone has clicked on an advertisement, are they really paying attention to it? The focus needs to be how can I keep my audience engaged. We all know that it's really easy to exit out of an advertisement.

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  2. I think that this is something that newspapers have quickly caught onto. I agree with you that the newspapers need to realize what their target audience wants, which generally is convenience. Most people would rather read the information online instead of either going to the store to buy a paper, or even subscribing to the newspaper since it is free online. Newspapers should realize this because it will keep them in business. Even our Simpson newspaper, The Simpsonian, is putting their articles online for those who do not want to go to their mailbox to pick up a copy.

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  3. I agree with Autumn that the use of the Internet has increased, yet there is still a large amount of people who still would prefer the newspaper over the Internet. The Internet has been transforming our society in many different ways, giving us the chance to either go along for the ride or sit back and become clueless about the new lifestyles people are acquiring. I agree that newspapers need to go along for the ride and make their paper available online because it would allow the paper to attract a broader target audience instead of just those who receive the actual paper. They newspaper could also keep the newspaper in paper form so they could still meet up to the other target audience's needs. It's all about the target audience!

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