Study & Write T3 (Influence of the digital media on traditional media)
For many centuries people have exchanged news via written media. With the invention of the Internet the principle of news exchange changed quite a lot, though traditional printed media still exists. In this post I would like to describe how blogs influenced written media, journalism and news exchange in general.
1. Information exchange speed and availability
It is obvious that the most important advantage of blogs is the fast speed news are delivered with and their availability, if we compare it with the traditional printed media. As I mentioned above, printed media still exists, though many people now tend to refuse from it, as they can immediately get necessary information and the most recent news from social media and blogs. In addition, the digital information is absolutely free, unlike many magazines and newspapers that need paid subscription.
One another great feature of blogs that influenced news exchange speed is RSS feeds. It is now much easier for news agencies to collect information for their blogs and news websites, as any updates from different blogs of different topics can be easily received by using RSS feeds. This means that news agencies can collect more information about the presented topic and write their own article.
What's also important is that any person can now try himself in a role of a journalist due to the easy setup of a blog. Before blogs and digital media were introduced, it was very hard to get your articles published in magazines and newspapers. And not only it positively affected amateur journalists but also professional ones, as now they can get much more ideas for their blogs as well.
2. Information quality
Though the availability and speed of news delivery has increased thanks to blogs and digital media, it also brought some disadvantages with it. Due to the fact that anyone can create their own blog and write what they want, it became harder to distinguish fake news from the truth. Articles now compete for attention with sensational headlines and ridiculous storylines. And fake news are actually shared more than any other news. That means that authentic content is hard to come by now. So, with social media as our new news managers, it is up to us to be the new fact checkers for media.
In my opinion fake news became useful for people to some extent, as people also became less trustful than before. It means that they check different sources and it is harder now to spread fake news unnoticed.
3. Advertisements
The biggest source of income for news agencies has always been advertising. For printed media, there were a lot of restrictions for advertisements. For example, the space on paper is limited and ads shouldn't take more space than the text itself, otherwise it won't be interesting to readers. It also means that ads placement has to be manually managed by news agencies on paper, more important ads should be on the first page, less important on the last page and etc. However, with the invention of blogs and digital media, advertising process became much easier. Websites can now display different ads depending on the preferences of a reader. Ad banners are usually located in the left or the right side of the page, so it requires much less manual managing of ad banners placement.
Moreover, amateur journalists that write their own articles and blogs can now get revenue from their talent as well. The process is pretty simple, as you only need to confirm that you would like to show ads on the webpage and the platform manages what ads are displayed itself. So, what's left for bloggers to get more revenue is to write more interesting stories.
To conclude, digital media has almost fully replaced the printed media. It had a great influence on how news are now delivered, though it is hard to evaluate whether the influence is mostly positive or mostly negative.
Sources:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/44386865_Blogs_news_and_credibility
https://www.jeffbullas.com/10-insights-on-social-media-and-blogging-influence-new-research/
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