To the future

10 years ago when you wanted to find out what was happening in the world, you would go to your local newsagents and buy a newspaper. Just one decade later and we are talking about the end of the newspaper. This is due to how the digital newsroom has grown, with websites able to post news as it happens and to show videos and audio it gives the consumer something which newspapers cannot compete with. However the newspaper still has its’ traditions, its’ usually high quality reporting, depending on which newspaper you buy, and the simple fact that you can read the news in your comfy armchair instead of staring at a computer screen. The future for us as journalists is an exciting one. The digital aspect of journalism gives us more mediums and avenues that we can venture down, for instance we can write an article and post it onto our own blog, then using social networks we can advertise our blog for free and get more people to view our work. The digital tools available to us as journalists allows us to be multi skilled and more employable. For broadcast journalists the development of the digital newsroom is a very positive step. From recording podcasts to uploading our videos to the internet it has never been easier to report on what is happening around you as it happens! The downside to this is that it is the same for everybody, which means that if you can upload your properly researched and well written articles, another person could write a badly researched and badly written article at the same time, meaning you are almost in competition for people to see your story.

Why do we still have newspapers?

With the ability to publish news stories almost immediately and the fact that it is cheaper to run, why are newspapers still competing with internet based news sources? Newspapers have one major advantage over the digital world from a news perspective. Whereas news online can be written by almost anyone, news stories in a newspaper have been written by journalists. The stories have been researched and put through an editing process and they comply (most of the time)with the law. Nowadays thanks to social networking, blogs such as this one, podcasts or even something as simple as a comment on a website, pretty much anybody can say pretty much anything they want pretty much any time they want! Now while this seems like a great technological advancement for the human race we have to consider that we may not want to listen to what the entire human race has to say. As citizen journalism becomes larger and larger, with more people voicing their opinions on the internet, the people who just want to read some proper news stories are going to have to search through more and more opinions to find the facts. It is this reason why newspapers are still available in the shops and why there is still a place for the newspaper in the modern newsroom.

Are papers yesterday's news?

The future of the digital newsroom has already begun. Newspapers are becoming less and less popular as more people start to use the internet as their main source of information. Newspaper companies are facing a losing battle against the internet for a number of reasons. First and foremost most information on the internet can be found for free online. Secondly the news can be put on the internet as and when it happens, instead of waiting for the next batch of papers to be printed and distributed, usually the following day. Another key factor that benefits the online newsroom against a newspaper is cost. Not only printing cost but the price of advertising as well. By visiting http://www.marketingminefield.co.uk/print-advertising-costs/ we can see the full extent of the advantage in cost that advertising online has. For a quarter page advert in your local newspaper you will pay around £250, for a full page colour advert in a national newspaper you could pay in excess of £30,000! Compare this to the internet, where a quick google search brings up advertising packages run by BT that cost only £70 a month! So as more people use the internet as a free source of breaking news stories, the internet becomes a larger market to advertise to, and it costs less to advertise! This means less people will pay newspapers advertising costs, meaning the newspapers lose money from people not buying their papers and also from people not advertising in their papers. Nobody is saying that newspapers will become obsolete instantly, but there are a lot of signs which point towards a time when they are no longer needed.