The Internet and Digitalization

859 Words2 Pages

Internet and digitization had deeply affected media and publishing sectors; consequently, it created a new space for competition. The Newspaper Publishing industry, for example, according Kaczanowska (2013) is in a dying phase of its life cycle as escalating competition from other forms of media, particularly web-based outlets, limits its market, that’s why newspaper publishers are moving most of their content to digital platforms to maximize its value. Picard (2009) elaborates that journalism must innovate and create new means of gathering, processing, and distributing information so it provides content and services that readers, listeners, and viewers cannot receive elsewhere. Meanwhile, the economic foundation for the traditional newspaper businesses is collapsing and the gathering and distribution of news has become more widely dispersed (Downie Jr. & Schudson, 2009), while online there are no added costs for physical transport and delivery and therefore online distribution costs are significantly lower than the distribution of physical content (Boczkowski, 2005).
The Internet which is a key ingredient in the recipe of democratization that is weakening dictatorships (Howard, 2011) and a tool empowering previously excluded groups (Mark Poster, 2001), provided people with access to acquiring information and access huge amounts of new and old information from traditional and new types of sources (Beam & Kosicki, 2014). The emergence of Internet, also provided the means for anyone to become a publisher, in addition to giving power to the audience who can find any information to control the messages he wants to be exposed to. New developments in communication have similarly led newspapers and broadcast news to create websites from ...

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...by which an innovation is communicated through certain channels over time among the members of a social system”. But, when any innovation is in front of people, two possibilities emerge; some people go with the flow and adopt this new trend, while others stay reluctant. Therefore, an innovation must be successful in order to spread in a fast way and make people more willing to adopt it. In our case, the success of online media is a powerful innovation that is shifting, partially, traditional media to online.
According to Weir (1998), a study of the adoption of an electronic news product produced by a metropolitan newspaper, found that use of the new medium was related to opinion leadership, the perception of internal incentives, and the perception of external benefits.
The next section will discuss the main questions that need to be answered throughout this study.

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