Millennial Generation won’t Pay for News
Chapter 7: Media Economics: The deadline meets the bottom line
As chapter 7 starts, my generation, the millennial generation, think that news should be something provided for us for free. We are a generation that is not using physically printed newspaper anymore; we tend to get all of our news throughout the Internet, whether that is social media or actual news websites. We don’t need to pay extra to receive this information; all these channels of media are achieved freely by us. So when we charged for information, we tend avoid paying for it since we are so used to getting it for free. This was not the case earlier, it was better understood that news deserved to be charged. Many people put a lot of work into journalism to deliver the news to the public and they deserve to be paid. This idea that news should be free has actually changed media economics; it does not make the profit it used to due to the advances in technology that has allowed us to get this information easier without charge.
This new way of delivering news through free services, such as the multiple Internet outlets, has lead to competition for media to provide the service that the public would go to the most. This made a lot of news sites change the way they went about their services, the free websites would get more hits than those getting charged, regardless if the content on the websites that charge is better. The free websites are making more money due to more people accessing their websites and viewing the advertisements on their page that allows them to be a free website. They are taking the charged websites consumers. This is forcing some news websites to reconsider whether they should charge consumers or not, making it a free service. This overall is changing the economy of media, reinforcing the thought that news should be free.
Nonetheless, journalism is still a very relevant and important career path that many people depend on to get their news. News corporations such as the Huffington post are mainly located online and they are an uprising news source competing against big print newspapers such as the New York Times. While it may be more difficult these days to charge people to pay for news, journalism is still very much alive since we come up with ways to still keep up with our consumers and make sure that we still get our deserved income, such as through advertisements. We may not be reading about Queen-B on the print paper anymore but we will still found out about Beyoncé’s success as she suggests, “I know you read the paper — the one that they call a queen, every radio round the world know me cause that’s where I be”. Media will feed you the news online or by the radio anywhere you are and will make money off of it in some sort of way, since it is all business driven.