Blog Post #1

News Organizations Reconsider Print Products

The High-Speed World of Multimedia Journalism leads to the plummet of ink-on-paper publications

In a digital era of non-stop news, newspaper publications and network news programs have plunged. More than 280 daily newspapers folded in the past 60 years, bringing the total of remaining newspapers to 1,422 in 2007. And by 2007 virtually all daily newspapers in the United States had a presence on the web.

The revolving multimedia of journalism is causing the number of print products to decline. 

Multimedia news products are becoming the norm and the field of journalism is facing drastic transformations. When surveyed, the majority of journalists said that their news organizations integrate the content on their Websites and the print products, rather than treat them as separate entities, and that multimedia news coverage, including blogging, is the norm in their newsrooms, according to textbook “Creative Editing.”

The people who produce our society’s future publications – editors, reporters, designers, and photographers – are the ones affected most by the technological changes.

The immediacy and easy accessibility to electronic information attract millions of people to the Internet, but for some, such as journalists and copy editors, the advantages of the advanced resources may also be disadvantages. Numerous news organizations have declared bankruptcy and at least two metropolitan newspapers, the Rocky Mountain News in Denver and the Post-Intelligencer in Seattle, completely discontinued their ink-on-paper publications.

The print products that survive and flourish are the ones that appear tech-saavy, capable of blending text, sound, photographs and video. The future of the newspaper industry is unstable and as technology evolves, the world of journalism is forced to adapt, resulting in the rapid increase of multimedia use, thus the rapid decline of print publications.

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