I’d argue that the news media in general is in decline because journalism produces content that does not interest enough people to sustain its audience. The internet has produced content that people want more, and the monopoly newspapers had over the classified market has migrated to cars.com, apartments.com, Zillow, Indeed, etc. Now that the journalism must carry its own weight (relative to providing value to the audience), we see that the news was not even the product readers were buying. They were buying classifieds and comics.
That’s exactly the point of Postjournalism and the Death of Newspapers. It’s not about the material carrier - the news media lost ads and news to the internet, and it turned out their business was built not on news and ads but on the monopoly over their delivery. The monopoly is gone, and so is journalism, now forced to mutate into postjournalism: news validation instead of news supply (as people always already know news from the newsfeed).
I’d argue that the news media in general is in decline because journalism produces content that does not interest enough people to sustain its audience. The internet has produced content that people want more, and the monopoly newspapers had over the classified market has migrated to cars.com, apartments.com, Zillow, Indeed, etc. Now that the journalism must carry its own weight (relative to providing value to the audience), we see that the news was not even the product readers were buying. They were buying classifieds and comics.
That’s exactly the point of Postjournalism and the Death of Newspapers. It’s not about the material carrier - the news media lost ads and news to the internet, and it turned out their business was built not on news and ads but on the monopoly over their delivery. The monopoly is gone, and so is journalism, now forced to mutate into postjournalism: news validation instead of news supply (as people always already know news from the newsfeed).