Oh where oh where have the papers gone?

Lately the press has taken a large hit when it comes to revenue. Traditional print news has been under threat for quite sometime. Since the inception of the Internet and other forms of media, people have been turned off newspapers and have been getting their news elsewhere. Newspaper companies have been making the online transition due to a loss of revenue, however, they are still finding that they are losing money. The very nature of the Internet allows for many various websites to post news, unlike the newspaper industry where the news was delivered by only a handful of distributers. Online newspapers are losing advertising revenue to other websites with news content. They simply were not able to integrate and make the transition to the Internet quick enough. This is probably a result of newspaper organizations being so rooted in a print tradition, they found it hard to convert to the Internet as quickly as it developed.

This loss of control by the large print companies may spell disaster for the capitalist system as a whole. As it is stated in  Communication and Mass Media Complete “The collapse of daily print journalism will mean many things  will seriously damage the press’s ability to serve as a bulwark of democracy.” In this article there is a direct correlation drawn between the traditional press and the upholding of capitalist ideals. Media Companies are continually pumping messages into the population that convince us to buy products and willfully obey a corrupt government and system. If they continue to lose revenue to alternative news found on the Internet there could be some dire consequences.

(2009).Reasons to Believe. Communication and Mass Media Complete. 47, 4.