Long live newspapers

            A word what I heard a lot at ISOJ (International Symposium of Online Journalism) 2013 was ‘crisis.’ Of course this meant the crisis of newspapers, and ultimately, Journalism. But at this year, I could not hear the word ‘crisis,’ a lot. Within a year, things have been changed a lot, from the despair towards the hope. Two papers, written by Chyi, Lewis and Zheng (2012) and Tennant (2014) supported the bright future of Journalism. Chyi et al. (2012) mentioned that newspaper over-exaggerated the newspaper crisis, by emphasizing dramatic and negative aspects quite frequently. Tennant (2014) argued that the advertising revenue model for free newspaper companies are still viable.

            Newspaper is an experience good, which “contains attributes that in the main can only be evaluated by the consumer after purchase through experience with good (Hoskins, McFadyen & Finn, 2004). This is definitely true. But newspaper itself has been changed a lot, allowing readers to ‘experience’ more from the contents. When ‘USA Today’ firstly launched, many scholars and even public criticized its traits that contained a lot of images and pictographs, because they thought that such graphics might threat to the quality of Journalism. Even though there have been still debatable issues regarding USA Today, these days, the circumstance of Journalism has been changed a lot. Nobody would not stick to the traditional form of Journalism; we need multimedia and easy-to-understand stuffs. 
           I think such changes originated from the differentiation strategies by newspaper companies. The reason that newspapers (including free ones) are surviving is that they are different from of other mainstream media. For example, free local newspapers only focuses on local issues, which was not usually covered in larger newspaper outlets. They might contain some pictographs to make readers understand easily. Of course, there might be a chance that advertisements are automatically exposed to readers, leading advertisements to be posted on the newspaper continually. If the survival of newspaper resulted from the differentiation strategies, such idea totally makes sense in these days.