Essay on Newspaper decline

Print sales have declined for a number of reasons. The first reason is the rise of the internet, and more specifically social media. More and more people have a presence online and are spending more and more time on their phones. Every day articles are posted online, and journalists are posting things online, so hundreds of thousands of people see articles online for free, which is much easier and cheaper than buying a newspaper. This is also the case for businessman who are on the train every morning on the way to work. They can look at the news on their electronic devices for free, and it is often easier to read than a physical newspaper, as the websites are customizable. This means that if you have an account for that website (which is normally free), then you can specify what articles you want to see, so if you don’t want to see Brexit, you don’t have to. This makes it a lot quicker to read the news for busy people.

Even though there has been a decline in print news circulation, the rise in online technologies and accessibility has enabled newspapers to expand their audiences, specifically to younger people as they would be unlikely to buy print newspapers, whereas they are always on their phones, so newspapers and the news in general in much easier to access, and free on most websites, except the Times and the Financial Times. Therefore, although the print sales have declined, at the same time newspapers have increased their audience by allowing people to read the news in different ways, so it is accessible easily to almost everybody.

Another way newspaper sales have declined is due to citizen journalism, participatory media and relationships with the audiences changing. Citizen journalism has increased due to the internet and social media, so when news stories are released online, people very quickly can work out how true the story is, and if it isn’t true, then there can be a lot of backlash for whoever posted the story. This can lead to newspapers building a certain reputation, so it deters people from buying their papers. The increase in participatory media is similar to this, as it is the audiences participating in the news, mostly by commenting on an online news article or posting about it on social media. This means that people can debunk stories if they have heard other information from more reliable sources and then comment on the original post with what they heard, which can instantly turn people’s heads away from that website.

This change is all shown in these statistics – the daily circulation for the daily mail is 1,228,002, but the daily number of website visits from adults is 169,400,000 on PC alone. This shows how big the news is now becoming online, and although print sales have declined, the online presence has rapidly increased. This is the same as the Guardian, which has daily circulation figures of 135,330, and 1,176,000 website visits from adults on PC.