Focus: Lecture - Age of Web News?

This week's lecture, we took a ship into the recent changes regarding to the news industry, especially with the printed media like newspaper and magazines.

Back in the old times, people consume 'old' media like newspapers before the dawn of the TV age. People buy them almost every day and newspaper companies make profits with classifieds and advertisements. People in the industry once regard classifieds as 'the river of gold'. But since the world wide web has dominated the media-scape with unlimited possibility, the old media started to fade out to the back stage, and people prefer not to buy the newspapers since there are news on the web that is free-of-charge.

People turned to their computers whenever they feel need to.

The web itself has changed dramatically through the time as well. First, there is Web 1.0, where the web is purely information-oriented. Companies post information on their website, and people use Internet browsers read them. Without using hyperlinks and pure information, there wouldn't be much interaction involved.

Now though, we are standing on the ground of the Web 2.0 age, where people share information using services like Flickr, Facebook, etc. It becomes more social-oriented. People who browse the web also are the producers of certain materials like photos, music and videos, we are also called 'Prod-users' as coined by Axel Bruns as we both are contributors and consumers of Internet media.

In the coming future, or maybe even earlier than we think, we will be entering the age of Web 3.0, where the web becomes a unified knowledge base. Using meta-tagging and search engine, machines can understand sentences and interpret them into useful information that fetch back to us. Every piece of information that sends to users will be customised, tailored and localised to fit them as best as it can.

However, with all these changes on the Internet, what left alone are the old-age media. Newspaper became less significant compared to 20 or 30 years ago, since readers prefer to read all the news on the web. Also, since the information provided to the users are hyper-localised and centralised according to their interests and values, readers become more ignorant and they started to lack common sense and general knowledge of things around them.

People now tend to take 'free news' for granted, and they feel entitled to have it for free. This really hurt the news industry as they heavily relied on revenues from advertising and reader-contributed classifieds. Newspaper companies now have their own website for news for quite some time, but in the future, they could no longer survive if they continue to provide free news. So a rather drastic change is needed in order to provide quality journalism.

News companies like The Times in the UK has used a membership-based subscription for their website, where readers can pay for a certain amount of money to read in-depth news, columns and commentary that would have been available for free in the past. So that makes people who have membership to gain privileges while news companies can generate revenue alternative to traditional printed media with ads and classifieds.

Paywall might be the only thing that saves people from reading low-quality news and sketchy 'investigative journalism' where some dodgy journalists nowadays only rely social media like Twitter and Facebook to research topic, which is quite daunting. And I certainly hope that in order to maintain a high standard of journalism, news companies will take this seriously while providing premium content, since people would not pay for it if the already premium content are in low quality in general.

In addition to this, I have read this piece of writing earlier where the author discussed about where we were in regard to the connection between people and media, as well as provided a future perspective on where we will be. A quite thought-provoking article that made me realise how drastic changes had taken place in the recent past, especially in the media side. Have a read!

D.