Advantages and Disadvantages of Internet and Newspaper Advertising

Last July, all of News Corporations’ UK – News of the World, The Times and The Sun – have been put behind paywalls. Putting up a paywall means that in order to access a paper 's content online, one will have to subscribe to it for a fee. The Wall Street Journal conducted such initiative about more then 10 years ago and the New York Timesestablished its new paywall since this year. Apart from online newspapers, a number of magazines such as the Economist and Harper’s have been doing this for a long time. Given the fact that one basic rule in the times of world wide web is to encourage to provide users with free information, it seems to be strange for those media conglomerates to disobey such rule and to put their online information behind the paywall. So the question is what are the advantages and disadvantages of such practice? In other words, this essay would examine what economic and social impacts the change would give rise to on the traditional way and whether these impacts are beneficial, harmful or still uncertain to judge. In the first part of the essay, the industry background would be introduced to show how newspaper industry were suffering from in the last few years and how internet affects the traditional way of reading news. Then, in the second part, some advantages and disadvantages concerning revenue issues, moral debate of journalism and isolation of the websites behindpaywall would be examined.
The last couple of years have been difficult for the newspaper industry, at least for most of the western countries. Print newspaper circulation figures have been falling steadily for more than a few years, and so has newspaper ad revenue, as a direct result of this. According to the statistics, between 2005 and 2009 the average circulation in North America fell by 11% and in Europe by 8%. Between 2007 and 2009 newspaper revenues in France fell by 4%, in Germany by 10%, in Britain by 21% and in America by 30%. Some people would blame the loss simply on

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