Oct 21 2010
Week 8 Response Questions
1. In response to my first question, I am still unsure of the reasons in which advertising via cable news hasn’t dropped like it has via local television, network TV, radio, magazines, and even online. My guess would be that businesses know that television reaches the most number of people in an unavoidable manner. Although there are millions of Internet users around the world, there are some people who still do not have access to the Internet, but may have access to cable TV. Internet technology may not have fully caught on like TV has due to economic divides, locations, and many other reasons and therefore, businesses may feel more comfortable paying for their advertisements to be put on Television. Another huge factor would be that online advertising and other types of advertising are easily avoidable. People can simply change a radio station, flip the page in a magazine, and close out the annoying online ads. With cable television, however, people stay tuned to their favorite television shows so they don’t end up missing anything, meanwhile they are forced to view the ads. The only reason I can think of that network TV and cable TV may differ on this subject would be that now people enjoy tuning in to specific channels, like the Discovery Channel, that caters their interest more so than general network TV.
2. In response to my second question, as I see it after our class discussion and reading the articles, as the Internet has changed the ways in which people receive news, news stories are no longer held in high esteem and attributed to the professionals, but are now considered more of a commodity. These commodities can be found, usually, on various sites on the Internet. It’s the ways, in which you brand that commodity (example: the New York Times), that will entice the users to actually purchase those commodities. However, overall many Internet users are still not willing to purchase information from the Internet, despite whether or not the site is one of their favorite sites. Therefore, businesses are going to have to figure out other alternative ways, if the pay wall doesn’t work for them, to sell their information in order to sustain their business. One possibility, as I mentioned in the question, is to be funded by nonprofit organizations or to possibly collaborate with amateur citizenship someway somehow. Another possibility would be to collaborate with other online businesses to form aggregate sites. This way, people would be able to customize their information through these aggregate sites and find which one’s contain the most information they tend to look for. That way more people might be willing to purchase subscriptions from these sites if they allow for generalization and/or customization. An example of this would be Digg.com. I think that many alternative models of online economics will be needed to sustain the various journalist businesses that are making their way and want to sustain themselves online. Without these alternative models, people may be forced to pay for certain information on certain sites, regardless if it is usable to them or not in the future in order to gain the overall general information that they seek.
3. In response to my third question, I believe that some news sites may be following this trend of specializing their news, for example by making it more localized or specific rather than general. Many local level news sites, of which include an international news section in their newspaper, may want to focus more in detail on local news online if they are trying to force a paywall. That way they would be able to charge their users for this news because their local news stories would be less of a commodity or even a brand, but would supply the individual reader with information about their area with much greater detail than anywhere else. Therefore, this would be more of an incentive for people to want to subscribe and pay for the information. In comparison with citizen journalism, however, I believe that local new businesses would still be able to sustain themselves depending on the amount of stories that they provided. A citizen journalism site may only be able to provide a select amount of information, whilst an actual business would have the professional resources to provide an extensive amount of stories on different local subjects.
I wouldn’t go as far to say, in response to the second portion of my question, that this could connect to the reasons in which people do not have a particular, favorite website. But rather, the aforementioned reasons are the reasons in which people have a lot more to choose from, and therefore may only skim headlines. If, for example, a local newspaper, of which had an online website , were to supply specific local stories in great detail, local people would be more prone to purchase and read it considering the story would relate to their proximity. Personally, I believe that skimming all relates to people’s relationship with the stories, no matter how broad or local and that overall most people will probably tend to read generalized headlines and specific headlines unless it captures their attention. Therefore, if there is a connection between websites becoming more specific and people not having a favorite website, I believe it would be a very weak one.