Introduction
There is no doubt that the use of new means of communication always has an impact on the news industry. Nowadays, the majority of researchers who are concerned about the problem of the dissemination of information in the modern world acknowledge that news organizations are having significant financial troubles related to changes on a global level. The problem is especially important for newspapers that are losing their audience in a rapid manner.
Analysis
Speaking about the financial problems of newspapers, it is necessary to pay focused attention to the essential process of renewal that takes place in any sphere of human activity. There is a range of ways that are used to disseminate information. Among them, there are television, radio, newspapers, printed books, theatre, and the Internet. There was a period of history when each of them (except for the latter) was considered as something really modern and fashionable, and the majority of people wanted to use these inventions for different purposes (Cho, Smith, & Zentner, 2016). Nevertheless, it is clear that history and technical progress never stand still; therefore, newspapers are being replaced by the Internet which attracts more and more users in different countries. The financial problems of newspapers are obvious as the number of available jobs in the industry decreases every year. In general, there are a few reasons for making the Internet more attractive to modern users. First, access to the Internet may be cheaper than a newspaper if we consider the amount of information that a person gets for the money (Paulussen & Harder, 2014). Also, it is necessary to use more material resources such as paper in order to create a printed newspaper whereas creating blog posts discussing the latest news is much faster.
There are a few ideas that are aimed to help news organizations to survive. For instance, one of the assigned readings discusses the opportunity to seek the support of non-profit organizations and post more newspaper articles online to attract the audience. Some researchers regard the use of social networks as news platforms for numerous newspapers quite effective (Ju, Jeong, & Chyi, 2014). All the ideas involve turning a newspaper into something different; despite that, it seems that there is no opportunity to avoid this process.
In my opinion, these ideas can help newspapers to survive, but the process of decreasing the revenues of news organizations is inevitable on a global scale. At the same time, I do not think that the industry will die soon; in fact, when cinema theatres appeared, many people thought that they would replace the usual theatres. Nevertheless, the latter still works. The same is true about television and radio. Therefore, I believe that the decreasing popularity of newspapers is essential, but the industry is not going to disappear and there will always be people buying and reading printed newspapers. Personally, I do not think that the news business is doomed because some ways to store and disseminate information disappear only in extraordinary cases. For instance, the tendency is more obvious in the case with different data storage devices such as videocassettes or CDs that are replaced by compact memory cards.
Conclusion
In the end, there is no doubt that the presence of financial problems in the news industry is inextricably connected with the growing popularity of the Internet that provides users with access to large amounts of information for a reasonable price. Despite that, the industry is unlikely to disappear even though the revenues will continue to decrease. As is clear from the proposed solutions that are expected to improve the situation, newspapers will have to change and use online platforms to attract a new audience and retain the old one.
References
Cho, D., Smith, M. D., & Zentner, A. (2016). Internet adoption and the survival of print newspapers: A country-level examination. Information Economics and Policy, 37, 13-19.
Ju, A., Jeong, S. H., & Chyi, H. I. (2014). Will social media save newspapers? Examining the effectiveness of Facebook and Twitter as news platforms. Journalism Practice, 8(1), 1-17.
Paulussen, S., & Harder, R. A. (2014). Social media references in newspapers: Facebook, Twitter and YouTube as sources in newspaper journalism. Journalism Practice, 8(5), 542-551.