New and Digital Media: News Case Study Introduction

BBC

• News Online had launched in 1997
• Available in 32 Languages
• Has an average of 4.2 million viewers

ITV

• First aired in 1955
• Average of 1.2 million viewers on 10pm Programme
• Has won a few awards such as the International Emmy Awards Current Affairs & News in 2009

Channel 4

• First aired in 1982
• Has been known for its investigative reporting
• Also notorious for including controversial topics.
• Would have a viewership of over 700,000.

The Guardian

• Have online readers of 8.2m unique visitors per month
• First introduced in 1821
• Would tend to have a Left-Wing opinion as its demographic may support left wing parties.

The Independent

• First founded in 1986
• Would tend to have Left-Wing opinions

The impact of Google

1) One of the reasons as to why there is a decline of the newspaper industry would be because of the ways that businesses can be promoted through Google. Since this website is very accessible to those who can access the internet, this would mean that they would more likely use the internet to attract the attention of the audience. Since it would make it easier for them to advertise to their demographic, it would be preferable to advertise with Google.  This would contrast the effectiveness in comparison to advertising on newspapers as this format wouldn't attract as much of an audience as online would. This could be due to online's wide variety of content to be accessed which would explain why more people would go online than read a newspaper.

2) "$60 billion plus of potential annual ad sales that print publications seem to have lost, Google had grabbed about $44 billion by 2012, from virtually nothing in 2000". 

3) It appears that 2004 was the year that it had gone into its steepest. This could be because of the rise of smartphones at the time which has had convergence as 2008 also saw a slight dip in advertisement investment into print. This would've probably explained why there has been more advertising online than on print.

4) In my opinion, I don't think that google is to blame for the loss of occupations from the newspaper industry. Google have found a phenomenal way to ensure that advertisers can promote their businesses. Since the internet is a widely accessed platform, then advertisers would want to use this to their advantage. Because of this, more and more people are likely to see the adverts online. Also since print starting to be considered a dying platform because of digital versions being available to readers, then this would be considered as putting themselves at a disadvantage as they may attract more readers onliner rather than on print since the internet is a vast platform that would host a lot of content made ready for an audience to access.

5) "The irony is that Google is probably more of a savior than a killer of journalism and editorial content. How many thousands of blogs, fan sites, writers, startup outlets, etc., have been discovered by Google’s search algorithms? How many talented artists and great stories have found a launching pad on YouTube and other Google outlets? How much content has been spread into new languages due to Google translate?"

In my opinion, I would agree with this comment. This would be because this would talk about how accessible the content for journalism is. The commenter also makes a valid point in adding in Google Translate. And I think this could be seen as a way for an audience to see multiple perspectives on one story as we could look as the foreign view and compare their ideologies to our own and see if they would also highlight some aspects that we may have missed.

"They don't earn very much from news related searches like “Benghazi interviews”. I would argue they make their money on the backs of commercial enterprise, not journalists. Sergey and Larry owe the news industry nothing".

I would disagree with this statement as I would say that Google could still have some form of income from news related content as there would be YouTube videos that would rely on distributing the news. And sometimes these videos might be monetized so therefore they would still get income from advertisers.