Thursday, November 19, 2009

Print vs online newspapers


source: www.malaysiakini.com


Print newspaper readership is slowly declining. The majority (74%) of Americans, or nearly 171 million people, read a newspaper in print or online during the past week, according to a new report by Scarborough Research (Sachoff, 2009.

However, this does not mean that print newspapers are going bust completely, rather the statistics show that print newspaper are adapting. However not enough are utilizing social media online to interact with their readers.

Malaysians relied on the mainstream media for information on corruption but they were concerned with biased reporting on the issue (Center for Independent Journalism. Online newspapers such as Malaysiakini and Malaysian Insider are popular as alternative news sources, especially on politics (The Malaysian Insider, 2009).

The advantages of online newspapers is that they provide information that is updated constantly, as opposed to print newspapers which have only limited number of additions per day.

There is also large amounts of space on online servers, so a story can be reported in more detail and carried for longer than in newsprint.

There is also the interactive element where the readers can leave their comments on the website. It's also much cheaper to host on web servers than publish on print. Online newspapers can aggregate together a large number of related articles from many sites.

They can also reach a global audience through the Internet. The disadvantages are the danger of altering and manipulation of online publishing by hackers or crackers, and inflammatory remarks posted in the comments section.

References

Centre for Independent Journalism 2009, Public want media to be more effective in reporting on corruption, , cijmalaysia.org, viewed 17 November 2009
http://www.cijmalaysia.org/content/view/513/6/

Sachooff, M 2009, Newspapers Not Effectively Using Social Media, webpronews.com, viewed 17 November 2009
http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2009/03/31/newspapers-not-effectively-using-social-media

The Malaysian Insider 2009, About Us, viewed 2 October 2009 http://www.themalaysianinsider.com/index.php/about-us

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