(source: blogger.com) It’s pretty funny how my mother can avidly buy daily local newspaper, the Daily Express, yet she rarely has time to read all of the content. I wonder what lies behind that ferventness, because from what is apparent, it won’t be long before my mother starts to rely on the internet to get her daily fix of the local news. Hence, I am inquisitive as to what drives her to keep buying the Daily Express, which change its name to Sunday Express every end of the weekend. Dvorak (2010) sneered at the fact that The New York Times will charge its readers to browse its pages on e-books, and found this preposterous, because not only thousands of redundant stories are being circulated, syndicated by the same newspaper giants; Google News and countless of online news disseminator are publishing free content. Personally, I would not be willing to pay for a newspaper, unless it features one-of-a-kind and/or attention-grabbing story or issue; which is sadly, would not be the case anytime soon.
The public agrees as generally, 88 percent of consumers get their news free of charge, and some major newspaper readership has been on a steady decline over the past few years, mainly because the supply of news media is, well, excessive (Jaffe, 2010). Apart from the flood of content redundancy, another factor that just riles us readers would be the ever-ubiquitous advertisements. The dependency of the newspapers on classified ads is what really obliterated them; along with the birth of Craigslist which exterminated the classifieds (Dvorak, 2010). Another issue on advertisement is further elucidated by Ahrens (2009), who found that standard daily circulation of all U.S. newspapers has been in decline since 1987 as newspapers have confronted escalating competition to win the audience as well as advertising. He stated that newspapers are successful online, but in readership rather than profit, and ads on online newspapers sell for meager value compared to ads in printed newspaper (Ahrens, 2009). Now, that is the reason why there are fewer ads on online newspapers.
Nevertheless, there is still hope for traditional newspapers in Malaysia. David Yeoh, managing editor of The Star, is positive that online media will not substitute newsprint in the near future, quoting "The generation that is comfortable with the newspaper as a product is still around. It will be at least one generation, at least 30 years, before newspapers can become outmoded here” (Frence-Presse, 2009). It’s also probably an ‘Asian’ thing because according to Hall (2010), the World of Association of Newspaper (WAN) stated that 7 out of 10 of the world’s 100 best selling dailies are now published in Asia. I guess this probably provided evidence as to why my mother never stopped buying newspapers after all.
References
- Ahrens, F 2009. 'The accelerating decline of newspapers', The Washington Post, 27 October, viewed 14 June 2010, <http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/10/26/AR2009102603272.html>.
- Dvorak, JC 2010, 'Newspapers are on life support, and they have no one to blame but themselves', PC Mag, 23 February, viewed 14 June 2010, <http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2360209,00.asp>.
- Frence-Presse, A 2009, 'Malaysian newspapers face challenge from online media', ABS-CBN News, 3 August, viewed 14 June 2010, <http://www.abs-cbnnews.com/technology/08/03/09/malaysian-newspapers-face-challenge-online-media>.
- Hall, R 2010, While Asia newspaper readership grows, with it grows journalistic responsibility, viewed 14 June 2010, <http://www.dtint.com/Blogs/55293-248/story.csp>.
- Jaffe, A 2010, Media consumption up but newspaper circulation down, viewed 14 June 2010,<http://www.editorsweblog.org/newsrooms_and_journalism/2010/04/media_consumption_up_but_newspaper_circu.ph
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