Convergence Case Study: Newspapers

The newspaper is an old medium with a history dating back to the invention of the printing press. As a medium of conveying news it came to maturity in the 19^th century, in the age of empires. Innovations in the printing press and long-distance travel meant that more newspapers could be printed and more could be delivered and read. Leading this innovation was the Times, a London based paper which in this era became the leading daily. The newspaper was the one and only media of the day, and it rose to prominence. Though the newspaper has had many battles to face over the 20^th century, the revolutionary mediums of sound and vision, radio and television, chief amongst them, the newspaper was never so threatened by any medium as it was by new media: the internet.

Newspapers were early adopters to the new medium of the internet. The Daily Telegraph launched its online paper in 1994, preceding Google, but alongside the first BBC news site. Other papers would follow, with the Times and the Guardian launching their websites in 1999. In that late-90s explosion of websites, the newspapers were quick to join, but though it went with fashion's flow, it did not innovate. At the time, the papers didn't predict how the internet would change the entire media.

The internet allowed news to be decentralised. Blogs give journalists less sway over public opinion when everyone, including those with a greater insight into matters, can make themselves known. Videophones and Youtube converge together to allow raw footage to be uploaded to the internet. A current example would be the hundreds of videos uploaded from around the Middle East, showcasing the battle between protesters and government forces to the entire world and not through any outlet other than independent ones. The most recent innovation is Twitter. One editor of CNN International has admitted that he no longer reads any newspapers: he simply follows the right people on Twitter, and the news comes to him. When a journalist in his position of command forgoes newspapers, it is evident that at some point, they have failed to converge with this new decentralised media. There are those who believe it is political pushing that drives media change and media convergence, and to a degree this is indeed true with the newspaper. But it is not that there is a political/corporate push, rather it is because that previous force has been weakened, and it is the lack of the political/corporate inherent in the decentralised internet that newspapers find themselves fighting.

So how do old and new media converge with newspapers? At the core of the matter is the problem of the outmoded print medium. Printed once a day, physical newspapers simply cannot keep up with news any longer. The Guardian tries to cope with this issue by keeping track of four updates: at their news desk they have a table of all the news that will go into the morning, afternoon and nightly updates of their website, and a selection of these articles will filter into the limited newspaper to be published for tomorrow. The Independent unskilfully attempts to be current with its 'News in 140 Characters', a daily segment of their newspaper dedicated to reproducing select tweets of the previous day. The Daily Mail is an oddity, as its online and offline papers are highly different. While its daily is marketed towards bored housewives and xenophobes, the Daily Mail recognises that this demographic doesn't overlap much with the technically minded regular internet uses, and so their online paper is geared towards a younger generation.

One thing in common between all newspapers is that they will advertise their online version in their daily. In this way they are promoting convergence to their audience by helping it become an interactive experience – and to further add to that interactivity, their audience no longer needs to write letters to be heard; they can go and post comments on the website and blog.

It is to the newspaper's favour that the internet is largely a text based medium, as, needless to say, so too is the newspaper. However, the high speed at which the internet world moves renders that favour redundant, especially with sites such as Twitter which actively promote a shorter attention span. How the newspaper can continue to compete, when most will look at an article and leave a comment saying 'tl;dr' (too long; didn't read) is a question yet to be answered.

The newspaper faces another issue with convergence, and that is revenue. Newspaper sales are down by a great amount from the 1990s and so advertising brings less revenue. No newspaper has as of yet managed to figure out how to tap into the internet market and succeed to make a profit, with almost all the UK newspapers currently in the red. The Guardian, though it is the single most visited newspaper website (this distinction discounts the BBC's own text-based news site), fails to profit from it. The Times and the News of the World have gone the pay-wall route, requiring a subscription approximately as costly as a printed paper subscription would cost. Though their readership took a hit, their revenue would be up. Whether this is enough to profit is yet to be seen. The Financial Times has an interesting take to this concept: though much of its content is free, there are also two pay walls with standard and premium subscription options. However, the Financial Times is comparatively niche to other papers, focusing on business, economics and finance; those that are in the business often require the Financial Times and have the income to spend £6.49 a week on subscription fees.

This relates back to the market theory, of which capitalism is the heart of. It suggests that it is purely economics that promote these changes. This too has a place when discussing newspapers converging with new media, as it relates back to their profitability, or lack thereof. The market theory would suggest that newspapers will disappear and something else will take their place, perhaps a decentralised network of news. That is to some extent already happening with Twitter, as it allows one to access news from various reliable sources, not necessarily papers, and is profiting unlike the papers.

The liberal or Whig theory posits that media strives towards a Hegelian end. All change is good. In the case of the newspaper, what might appear to be a negative – its relative failure to converge successfully with new media – may in face be a positive. As already discussed, decentralised news is the innovation of the internet era. While newspapers were highly important from the the 18^th century onwards in disseminating information and swaying public opinion, they can no longer report the news fast enough to keep up. Having said that, newspapers still find ways in which to converge successfully on occasion, and perhaps they will eventually strike upon the right balance and survive. One recent example is Cablegate. As hundreds of thousands of cables were put online, it was the utmost priority of the Guardian, the New York Times and Der Spiegel to find and spotlight the most important of these, else many of them might have been lost amongst the vast bulk of the leak.

One other model, technological determinism, suggests that media changes and converges as new technology is invented to make the best of it. This was true for the journalism at the heart of newspapers in the 20^th century: the text-based newspaper cannot be replicated over radio or television, but each of these mediums took what was at the core of the previous one in creating the new one. Internet-based journalism is different than the above three, however. Where newspapers are textual, radio is aural and television is visual, online content has the ability to be all three and one more: interactive. The Guardian recently converged the interactive with the visual and textual by making an interactive timeline one can scroll through to view events. Each event can also be clicked on, linking it back to the Guardian article written at the time of its happening.¹

Newspapers have attempted to embrace new media, at first half-heartedly and later with greater effort. But they still have not struck the balance and converged with new media in a way that ensures their survivability. It is yet unknown what might happen to them. It's possible that, as the decades pass and history becomes split between pre-internet and post-internet, the newspaper will become entirely outmoded, just as the market and technological determinism models would suggest it would.

1http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/interactive/2011/mar/22/middle-east-protest-interactive-timeline