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Tucker McIlwrath, Jake Mikucki, Lauren Pearce, Hannah Sheehan, and Michael Noone
Newspapers used to be one of the only ways to keep people up to date on what’s happening, whether that be local or national. However, over the past two decades or so their sales have been dropping and newspapers are becoming obsolete thanks to this new digital era the world has entered. We have become dependent on the internet because of its constant updates and 24/7 stream of information. Newspapers are having trouble competing against the digital world for a couple of reasons.
One of the biggest things that this new medium has taken over is advertising. Newpapers started out being one of the few places where companies could advertise their new merchandise by purchasing various amounts of letters and space in that mornings paper. But now televisions can show footage of the product being used which is something newspapers can’t replicate until holograms are made accessible for everyday items. That’s not even mentioning the internet. Google throws advertisements at its users by the ton. The internet has an infinite amount of room while newspapers have to stick to only a few pages.
As mentioned before, newspapers also can’t put out a quick, steady stream of updated information like the digital world can. On the digital world’s side there’s urgent news updates interrupting your favorite program, there’s Amber Alerts and countless different social media platforms that are kept updated by the minute. A newspaper updates you once every day and that’s still incredibly fast.
The final, and perhaps biggest, reason that the newspaper industry is falling to the digital world is money. Some of the different websites that are updated 24/7 with new facts and stories are free to access while most newspapers cost money to receive a copy of. Some papers have tried converting over to an online base but many still require money to access the content. This is a major disadvantage to them as a lot of websites allow you to access their content for free.
This article discusses the experiments done in 2015, studies of why millennials are still engaging in magazines when technology is on the rise. These procedures were done through mostly focus groups and surveys, they analyzed the data by gender, ethnicity, etc. Focus groups were given magazines and then online articles, and they were analyzed through their response to different types of media. Through their reactions to all media, the experiment would test why they still are drawn to magazines, what gratification millennials still got from magazines in the Internet age.
What the study shows is that the online surveys were given far more attention but the focus still showed interest in the overall aesthetic of reading from a magazine. The millennials were more interested in how it felt to hold a magazine and still have the nostalgia of having a physical copy. They said that they appreciated the fact that there still was a magazine busine