The Rapid Decline of the Media Industry

• The physical news media industry is in decline.  More people are reading the news online or watching it on TV rather than reading a physical newspaper.  As a result, newspapers are losing revenue and journalists are getting laid off.
• Advantages:
• Online is cheaper
• Less paper used (better for environment)
• With online journalism, anyone can report on what they see
• Unedited content online, no one controls what you see
• Disadvantages:
• Job loss
• Anyone can post (just flat wrong but passes as fact b/c no fact checking)
• Discuss in a social context (S&E issues).
• As society gets more digital, online newspapers get more popular, as do Twitter and the like.  As a result, less people buy newspapers because they can get the same news on the internet.  This has its up and down sides.  On the one hand, online news posted by random citizens is unedited.  No one edits or controls what gets posted in blogs, or what people say on Twitter, so information is harder to suppress.  On the other, no one controls what is online, so there is no editing.  People can pass off their own opinions as fact and the only thing to prevent that is their word against the word of other people on line.
• Is there a solution, or a need for one?
• Not really.  It is to be expected that physical media will decline as online media gets more common and more prevalent.  The major news agencies would do well to adapt to the changing environment.  At its heart, the economic system of this country works in this way.  The world changes, and the first people to figure out how to take advantage of the new system get ahead.  While the decline in people reading or watching the news at all would be a tremendous problem, the change in the method by which they receive information is not.