mass-communication-theory

CHAPTER 10
278
MEDIA AND SOCIETY: THE ROLE
OF MEDIA IN THE SOCIAL WORLD
How do we keep up on news about what is going on in our neighborhood, our
city, our state, our nation or around the world? How do we find out about the
latest fashions, movies, technology, and diets? We live at a time when a lot is
happening everywhere and all at once. Information about products, peers, family,
community, state, nation, and the world constantly comes at us from an evergrowing
array of media. News is created and packaged by an impressive array of
sources ranging from journalists to bloggers to YouTube enthusiasts. With our news
we face an ever-growing amount of promotional information produced by advertisers,
public relations agents, and others engaging in strategic communication. This
information is often integrated with news so it’s hard to tell what is news and what
is advertising or PR.
The way we receive and use information is being radically transformed by new
media technology, and that has created a very difficult situation for traditional
news providers. Print newspapers are rapidly losing readers, especially young readers,
and they are hemorrhaging advertisers. More than a few have shuttered their
operations. Many have reduced the physical size of their pages to cut the cost of
paper. Some are publishing fewer days per week. A few have decided to exist only
on the Internet. Some are becoming nonprofit corporations to reduce taxes,
enabling them to stay in business.
Yet news on the Internet has been quite successful, as traffic on many newsoriented
sites rapidly and steadily increases. And although newspapers often offer
free access to much of the content published in their print editions, income from
Internet advertising doesn’t approach making up for revenue lost by their print
editions. Industry research indicates that although the online newspaper audience
is at record highs, growing by more than 60 percent between 2005 and 2008, a
print reader is worth $940 a year while a Web reader is worth only $46. In other
words, a print reader is worth more than 20 times an online reader (Chittum
2009; Sass, 2009b). In addition, on the Internet those same newspapers are competing
against each other for regional and national audiences. They also compete
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