The Pros and Cons of Digital News

That the news has largely switched from a print format to a digital one has many pros and perhaps just as many cons.

The good news:

Speed, efficiency and access

· With newspaper, readers received their news first-thing in the morning and then perhaps in a separate evening edition. The same goes for televised news broadcasts with the exception of events so catastrophic the media can justify interrupting regular programming.

· Online news updates as soon as new information becomes available. No more waiting for the next day’s paper to learn the details of a story that the evening broadcast only dedicated two minutes to. No need to watch four hours’ drivel of “breaking news coverage”; read the article online, get the facts, and move on with your day.

· Concerned the article you just read didn’t provide enough details or perhaps seemed biased? Don’t buy a second paper, just click to a different website and, voila! you have a new angle and almost unlimited resources for further research.

The bad news:

Limited income

There is widespread concern about where news agencies will generate income without subscription fees and advertising revenue that is quickly evaporating.

Newspapers traditionally depend upon a wide variety of advertisers, classified ad listings and subscription fees to supplement costs and provide profit.

· With online news, there are only a handful of advertisements per page, often only one.

· Online classifieds listings such as Craigslist offer full-page ads with multiple color pictures for free, eliminating any incentive to publish an ad in the paper.

· Online news sources have yet to develop the balls to charge a subscription fee to their readers. Reason being, if one source has a fee, readers will simply receive their news from a free source and advertisers will drift there as well.

Limited sources

With limited finances come restrictions in other areas, namely employees.

A struggling or limited budget news agency can’t always afford to send its reporters on-location for a story, especially if it’s happening overseas. In cases such as these, an agency will purchase the rights to publish a story from a larger company such as the Associated Press.

This means that many agencies publish the same story, which leads to a lack of objectivism when a story has only one angle provided by one reporter.

My take

I’m old school. When I read a book or a magazine, I want to read of a page, not a computer screen. I like the feel and smell of the printed page.

That said, I won’t cry if newspapers disappear completely. I briefly took out a subscription last year to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. While reading from an actual paper made me feel sophisticated, I hate how overly large and unwieldy a paper can be. There’s also a lot of content in there I’m paying for that I don’t want to read.

Reading online solves those issues for me. Except for that feeling of sophistication.