Journalism Essay

0. Introduction

This paper aims to investigate the struggle journalism has to face these last few years, and what the uprising of social media means to the future of journalism. The first part of this research article sketches the context of journalism in several aspects. Economic, social, as well as cultural aspects will be discussed. Part two will be a sketch of the context of social media. By using the same structure as the first part, we want to build a global structure into the article to set up a certain order that makes everything clear. Part three is where we assemble both branches into one unit. The result of this method should give us a draft of what the future holds for journalism, and how social media will play part in it. A conclusion in the end is used to compare our results to the expectations we had at the beginning of our research.

I. The aspects of journalism nowadays

News and media is one of the sectors that has been struck the during the on-going financial crisis. In the U.S. for example, newspaper pioneers such as Ann Arbor and Seattle Post-Intelligencer shut down in 2009, others such as the New York Times plan cuts in their newsroom staff. These calamities aren’t only happening in the U.S., but it is a global trend, as suggested by the graphs of newspaper sales in Germany and the U.K. below:

How is it that the financial crisis hits the newspapers much harder than other sectors? The answer isn’t one-sided, but can rather be split in three different aspects:

From an economical point of view, plunging sales as illustrated previously, as well as huge losses of advertising revenues are part of the story. The sector has been affected by a phenomenon known as a “digital revolution”. The internet has become ...

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...al, we hope) decline of print.’ It is clear that this evolution also contributes to the rescue of the rainforest.

The question if traditional newspapers will survive is unanswerable, but fact is that the newspapers will have to stay renewing if they want to subsist. In that way, we can say that traditional newspapers will evolve, and will not have the same look in twenty years as they have now.

IV. Conclusion

When we first created our research question, what the impact is and will be of social media on the traditional newspapers, we thought that the impact of the new technology, specifically social media, wasn’t that noticeable. But when we did some research and investigated the hard data about the impact of social media on the traditional newspapers we were astonished. Social media is changing the entire journalism industry, faster than we can imagine.