NDM: The changing face of news media

Blog task 1: News institutions research

Research the major players in terms of UK news providers and make notes in a detailed blog post. List companies, publications/channels/programmes, owners, statistics and anything else you find relevant.

BBC 

The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) is a British public service broadcaster with its headquarters at Broadcasting House in London. The BBC is the world's oldest national broadcasting organisation and the largest broadcaster in the world by number of employees. The BBC has 5 main channels:

• BBC News
• BBC One
• BBC Two 
• BBC Three 
• BBC Four

Sky
Sky UK Limited (formerly British Sky Broadcasting and BSkyB) is a telecommunications company which serves the United Kingdom. Sky provides television and broadband internet services, fixed line and mobile telephone services to consumers and businesses in the United Kingdom. It is the UK's largest pay-TV broadcaster with 11 million customers.

ITV
Independent Television, a British television network:

Blog task 2: The impact of Google

Read this article looking at the impact Google has had on the traditional newspaper business.

1) Why has Google led to the decline of the newspaper industry?

Google provides users with a vast amount of information available at the touch of their fingertips. This makes newspapers redundant as they are not as quickly accessible and free like the internet's information is. 

2) Find a statistic from the article that illustrates the decline of traditional news media.

' More than $40 billion, or about 60 percent of the ad revenue the industry generated at its peak in 2000, according to figures from the Newspaper Association of America '

3) Looking at the graph featured in the article, what period has seen the steepest decline in newspaper advertising revenue? 

2007 had the biggest decline at $25 billion

4) Do you personally think Google is to blame for newspapers closing and journalists losing their jobs? Why?

Personally, I feel that the advancement of technology was inevitable. The golden days of newspaper was bound to happen eventually. Although they caused the downfall of newspapers, they did not intentionally -cause it.

5) Read the comments below the article. Pick one comment you agree with and one you disagree with and explain your response to the comments in detail.

'Obviously, Google is not to blame. I don’t think it’s about blame. I think the Internet is incredibly poorly designed. Rather than being free, everything on it should cost something in order to compensate creators. We have a proven system for doing this through organizations like ASCAP and BMI. The principal of royalties for profiting from the content of others is well established. Google came along, and, at least in the case of Youtube, knowingly robbed content creators for years in order to build up the business. The ideal system would be one in which every click resulted in a nano-charge on your phone bill, maybe 1/1000 of a cent for a news story, for example. Sites like Google that link to other sites could also pay in very tiny increments.'

This comment by Phil Hood brings up the interesting idea of charging users for the information they can access on the interest. I don't particularly agree with his outlook but I agree with his thoughts on google is not entirely at fault for the downfall of newspaper.