The impact of digital news platforms on newspapers

Following the emergence of television, radio, and telegram, newspapers have endured numerous challenges over the last decades.

However, social media incline has affected the conventional newspaper approach, which has forced both large and small newspaper outlets to become more innovative.

The evolution of the internet has penetrated every sphere and has also taken advantage of News. Today, there exist digital newspapers that are accessible from anywhere around the world using the internet. Additionally, people also receive news through email.

This has resulted in the need for the new paper providers to evolve as the method of accessing and providing news changes. In this case, in the past, reporters and journalists presented the news to the public after conducting in-depth research and also fact-checking to determine the accuracy .

This was essential in providing authentic news and remaining accountable. However, today, newspapers are pressured to disseminate the news as fast as possible as such the newspaper entities are keener on beating the blogs in distributing news stories.

This has significantly affected the quality of news leading to the rapid spread of fake news. Social media has also affected the way people consume their news stories, ultimately affecting newspaper presentation of the news material. People are experiencing decreased attention, whereby they only scroll through the newsfeed and only read the headlines.

Additionally, most people get their news from their social media timelines. For example, breaking stories on the newsfeed lead them to news sites. As a result, newspapers have also created social media profiles .

They use these profiles to post a picture and an accompanying caption. Through the caption, they guide their interested followers to their news websites.

In response to the decreasing subscribers and increasing online news consumers, newspapers have devised a new way to adapt. In this case, newspaper entities such as Daily Guide and Ghanaian Times have resorted to the provision of online articles. They have websites where they publish their news content . In a given month, they allow individual access to only three articles.

For further access, an individual is required to subscribe by paying a certain amount of money, which can be monthly or annual. Secondly, most entities have adopted the approach of publishing web stories and texts before writing a text story for print copies.

Other newspapers have resorted to availing digital editing of print newspapers, which can be accessed on the web and downloaded. However, they are not very popular.

Lastly, some newspapers such as the Independent have dropped print copies altogether and adopted electronic edition.