News has been considered a vital component of human society and people’s everyday life. Its sources and mode of transmission have advanced, with newspapers holding a prominent reader share for a long time. With technology taking over every aspect of our life, newspapers have also recorded a decline in their sales over years and a shift of readers to the online platform. With newspapers failing to engage younger age groups as their readers and increasing sales of newspapers, one has to wonderl will technology cause the demise of this sector. Is lack of advertisement, or lack of engagement the reason for this decline? With online platforms providing support such as audio of the article or an embedded video, is yellow journalism critical to increasing numbers of readers? How is the competition to present news first aiding outsourced services for the newspapers?
The movie “Nightcrawler” shows that news sells on the sensational reporting, even advertisement contracts are more with such news mediums. Media and online news platforms can capitalize on this ‘sensational reporting’ which words in a newspaper may fail. Readers are more engaged through an online medium as one click can lead them to a new video of the news something they can not do in a newspaper. Therefore, the decline in the number of copies sold by a newspaper may have nothing to do with advertisement or engagement at all, but how it is selling itself by an environment of electrifying presentation. In this technology-driven world, anyone with a phone and a social media presence can upload the ‘scoop’ of the story, people get millions of followers overnight just by recording something at the right time. Whether online or printed newspaper the competition to have access to the most updated news has led to many forms of outsourcing such as content writers, blog writers, photographers, etc.
News will remain essential to human societies to make sense of the ever-changing world. Its medium may keep evolving but the responsibility of ethical and honest reporting weighs more than creating higher engagement and profits for the news companies.
