Reinventing print media
Newspapers used to be the primary source of news transmission in the 18th century. During that time, most of the popular papers worldwide were born attracting a huge audience. Newspaper journalists used to act as watchdogs and were concerned to provide readers with interesting stories about sports, politics, and other topics. However, with the rise of the internet, the pressure on the print media has increased. I chose to talk about The Daily Mail newspaper that faced similar challenges to the newspapers we studied in class.
Nowadays, many newspapers are shutting down, and others are laying-off employees to remain in business. This recession is due to the decline in their circulation, advertising revenues, and in their readership. However, people are still consuming news but in different manners. Journalists are finding new challenges in their job, they are producing additional content, learning multimedia skills, creating content for multiple platforms, continuously updating the web, and interacting more with the audience (Bossio, 2017). The Daily Mail newspaper worked to change its business model and adapt to the online world by managing the most visited English language newspaper in the world through their free website, Mail Online. The parent company also worked on new ways to improve customer orientation by investing more in subscriptions streams and social media usage (DMGT, 2016). Traffic does not worry Daily Mail, since their website is performing well in driving traffic. Since the usage of smartphones for news consumption is growing and facilitating access to the news, Daily Mail launched a mobile app called “Mail Plus”. With this advanced innovation, users are more interactive with the paper providing them innovative content, interactive puzzles, and 360-degree photography (DGMT, 2016). In my opinion, the presence of Daily Mail on Facebook and Snapchat has increased the audience’s engagement by providing readers the ability to express their thoughts along with the option to share the news with their social networks. In addition, they were able to reach a younger audience and allowed users to subscribe in order to discover more content. With the presence of Mail Online, the revenue of the parent company has increased 25% (Sweney, 2019).
Sweney, M (2019) Mail Online ad revenues soar as print stablemates suffer. Retrieved from: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2019/may/30/mail-online-advertising-revenue-growth-daily-mail-general-trust
Bossio,D (2017). Journalism and Social media. retrieved from : https://lms.aub.edu.lb/pluginfile.php/654144/mod_resource/content/1/Social%20media%20and%20the%20newsroom%20.pdf
Daily Mail General Trust Annual Report (2013). Retrieved from: https://www.dmgt.com/~/media/Files/D/DMGT/reports-and-presentations/100-31110.pdf
Photo source: https://www.prolificlondon.co.uk/news/tech/2019/02/newsguard-reverses-daily-mail-browser-warning
