The transition from the paper to digital was like replacing your grandpa with your grandchild as the main source of news. At the same time, good-quality competing print media still appear to exist, and especially the daily edition is struggling to get hold of readership, be of importance, and, of course, make money.
But for sure, the eyes are the real gold. Hence, the article has chosen to present the ongoing competition among the most influential newspapers in the world with the assistance of the examples mentioned in the paper.
The Elite Newspapers
The newspapers from all over the world are:
– The New York Times – The Wall Street Journal – The Washington Post – The Guardian – The Financial TimesThese ones have national and international challenges as well.
Subjects of Debate
Tech-savvy Generation
As the newspapers go all out to recapture their lost readers, they have also shifted their focus on the digital side where they are engaged in the competition of who will take the largest part of the pie. They see the digital world as a place where they can still be relevant and print is only dying a little slowly. The New York Times had a digital circulation of more than 10 million by that year, 2023.
By 2017, the podcast “The Daily” was a venture of a country and it was being broadcasted mainly to the world thus grabbing the first place as the most-listened news podcast. Accordingly, it has been the freshest and most interesting information, confirming that “The Washington Post” is stressed and is getting a lot of attention for moving from print to digital audio.
The Post has been investing in technological innovations as Bezos bought it in 2013. They not only developed their own content management system that they called Arc Publishing but also they are planning to sell it to other media outlets.
WSJ Plus was a paid membership program (WSJ Plus) that ran at the Wall Street Journal and was an additional digital growth strategy.
The strategic approach of The Guardian was not only to change their business model to fit the ‘free economy’ but also to ask for the readers’ payments on a voluntary basis, thus, the decision to make the payments voluntary service brought them over a million recurring contributors in 2022.
Investigative Journalism It is worth noting that the element that was recognized as the most significant change factor was the consecutive unearthing of bigger stories.
Ed Jarvis: The investigative reporting on the Watergate stories at The Washington Post in the early 1970s set a high standard. Similarly, the Post’s 2016 investigative report that exposed Donald Trump’s no charitable donations during his campaign led to the Trump Foundation’s closure.
What an interesting turn of events! It was the stories of Harvey Weinstein published by The New York Times and The New Yorker that earned the two publications a Pulitzer Prize, and the stories also had a significant role in the success of #MeToo movement.
The events in the world arena that The Guardian was investigating were connected to Wikileaks and Edward Snowden. Their 2018 disclosure of Cambridge Analytica was what initiated the congressional inquiries and then the legislation that Facebook had to obey.
By 2015, the Wall Street Journal had nearly conducted their own investigation of Theranos which led to the uncovering of the company’s fraud long before the company’s scandalous downfall.
Editorial Voice
It was a fundamental change they did and it means shifting the editorial voice responsible for a publication’s unique character that can attract and maintain the readership. For example: The Wall Street Journal – business news, center-right editorial slant. In other words, the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal has on quite a few occasions beat the drum, calling for a reduction in the tax rate and lesser business regulation.
They had been putting their finger on the pulse of everything involving Nature and environmental issues for a very long time. However, it came to pass that in 2020, the company decided to stop accepting oil companies’ advertisements; therefore, not taking any more ads from oil companies was the same as the fact that they had not accepted any such advertisements in the past.
Every day, The New York Times is dig for the most extensive, most multi-faced as well as the most complex and largest news stories in the U.S. and all around the world, thus trying to serve its readers to the best of its capacity. After all, the end of The 1619 Project blew the lid off a hot debate and the issue of slavery in the U.S., being indeed, as the author identified, the main reason for the American Revolution.
Additionally, The Financial Times mainly covers the business side of news in comparison to the political events, but still, they are towards the right and center. To be specific, it is a publication that discusses the topic of business and has not only spoken on the matter of environment but also has implemented a policy that is one of the greenest and the most eco-friendly in the world of media as they are thusly more liberal and thusly more progressive.
Niche Expertise
By focusing and niche operations, media are no longer just doing business through the common media but their business and economic news are seen in international terms, the source of the blowout. The company’s publication of the yearly report “FT 1000: Europe’s Fastest Growing Companies” and the fact that the news of the industry’s movements can hardly wait to update the events confirm the company’s enormous interest in the topic.
One of the sources is the Wall Street Journal, and it is precisely the one, all of which they will not leave Most of them, provided with the section “Heard on the Street”, have the willingness to quit.
If we compare The Washington Post’s political reporting on U.S. politics with any other newspapers, we will see that it is the first on the list with the development of the area.
The paper’s record of lies by President Trump, which was truthful and continuously updated during all his days as president, was also widely shared, even if only in a few other short articles.
Global Expansion
Some Publishers have, however, identified the new big consumer groups they are appealing to. The New York Times can be a good example of this, who have gone to as far as spending millions of dollars in going global. Although the editorial group of Techint may be so much different from Bloomberg and ESPN who take out the columns El Financiero de Mexico, the three companies are still working in their consolidation.
By stepping into the limelight, the newspaper’s overseas editions, The Guardian US and Guardian Australia, not only gave the publication wider coverage, but also generated a renewed drive to explore new areas. The trope of being a champion of the environment of The Guardian Australia has been a significant factor of the newspaper’s success; it has been ranked by the selection of the most informative outlets in the consumers’ list of climate change and related indigenous matters.
The Financial Times strengthened their global presence by acquiring the majority of shares in The Economist from the Pearson Group through a deal, but at the same year-end, they decided otherwise and it was sold back to Pearson Group.
Challenges and Adaptations
A clear and simple statement with heavy numbers that newspapers cannot deny the new way of life of their own retrogressively would eliminate the remaining doubts:
Print revenue shortfall: Think about the case where the income from the printed advertisements in the first three months had decreased by 26% for The New York Times this year when you had a total of 3265 space units of advertising in 2020.
BuzzFeed News with a total of 1 Pulitzer Prize won in 2021 was the most prominent example among other media players of a new media entity being able to compete with traditional ones on the highest level of journalism today.
The June 2021 Pew Research Center study reveals that almost half of U.S. adults regularly (sometimes or often) access social media for their daily news updates.
The news consumption has changed to be in a great manner since no newspaper medium was mentioned as a first source of information among the youngest in comparison with the elder ones. It is only a 16% share of young people in the US aged 18-24 that said they used papers as their only source of news last year, as per the latest report from the Reuters Institute.
Strategies adopted by the newspapers to cope with these changes are as follows,
Continuous investment in data journalism and contestables: The New York Times publishes the Covid-19 interactive chart daily as their continuous effort to update the tracker and make the newspaper the consulted source in real-time was the leader in data journalism during the pandemic.
Experience: The Wall Street Journal is running a Snapchat Discover channel that they equate with a place kids like and stay.
Income Variation: During the last year, The Washington Post has been able to arrange nearly two hundred events where the tickets were paid for—mostly at the “PostLive” series that comprised the interviews of the well-known personalities.
Extended Outlook
The new media development is a matter of fact, and traditional newspapers cannot disregard this fact if they are interested in continuing to exist; quite the contrary, only those who introduce good journalism mixed with digital innovations and consistent business models can be considered as winners in this challenging race.
Even with the success stories of games, the irreversible tense competition is the factor that still maintains the value of professional journalism in the age of information overflow. Furthermore, this could be a feature of news agencies—that from the speciality within The New York Times to the global news side of The Guardian, multimedia stories still seem to be in demand. It is not, however, just the advancements garnered by today’s journalistic reporting—raw data and the
Discover more from AGENDAPEDIA
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.