Online social and participatory media

4 SET TEXTS

1.The Observer Online - www.theguardian.com/observer

2.Social and participatory media –The ‘comment is free’ website https://www.theguardian.com/uk/commentisfree

3. The Guardian Twitter feed https://twitter.com/guardian

4. The Guardian Instagram feed https://www.instagram.com/guardian/

An online presence makes it a possible economic future for news organisations, by

monetising online content through voluntary donations and membership.

Monetising – Earning revenue from a business

Why do Newspapers try and avoid going online?

You can access a newspaper online for free which means they will not make any money whereas an actual paper will fund 

FUNDING: The Guardian online, The Guardian social media & Observer Magazine 

Contributor, members, subscriptions and donators: The Guardian/Observer are currently experimenting with this model to protect free online content. During October 2017, they released that they had 800,000 paying contributors worldwide and that this income exceeded that from advertising.

Monthly subscriptions via Kindle: The Guardian/Observer offer their publication on Kindle devices. This is an example of convergence. The monthly subscription is £9.99, but to entice readers they offer  14 day free trial.

Convergence -  the merging of two or more products into one device

Cross-Promotion: The Guardian/Observer advertise their sister magazine ‘The Guardian Weekly’. Although they are not gaining revenue specifically from the magazine itself, they do gain funding from advertising this as it gains exposure and entices readership.

Online Advertising: While online advertisers reach a global audience, they are able to sell advertising to different national audiences

The advetiser gets more money every time  the adverts get played 

What are the advantages of print technology and what issues does this causes for online technology?

•Print version provides much more detail on the front page, this is because print is a better technology for detailed writing

•Print newspaper allows for much more varies layout as it is far less constrained by size considerations

•Print version can print large photographs and graphics, which creates much more of a visual variety and interested

•Advertisers can be offered a range of display advertising, including full page adverts

•Online homepage does not have as much detail (specifically of one story)

•Online webpages is constrained by size and therefore is limited from changing it page layout

•When viewing a website, specifically on a mobile phone you are limited by the images that you see as you are restricted by the size of your screen

•Advertisements are limited and in turn advertisers have small spaces to gain exposure

1. Describe 2 ways a newspaper is funded. Use The Guardian and Observer as examples in your answer. [4] 

The Guardian/Observer is funded through the print by selling the real newspaper to you directly in the form of a hard copy. The online version of The Guardian/Observer is funded through online contributors who will donate money to help the paper keep going as well as subscriptions to the magazine which allows added perks such as being able to access exclusive content  this also merges with convergence as you can subscribe to the paper online on the kindle to engage the audience they are targeting to view their online media. 

2. How have funding issues have affected the drive to online media? [4]  

Because there are lots of  ways to fund the online version of the online media version of the paper as you can for example have subscriptions do convergence with other products such as the kindle to advertise whereas with the hard copy of the newspaper there are only very limited ways to fund it such as subscriptions and donations.