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No matter what your interest is in the media it’s hard to escape talk about the possible demise of the journalism industry. Once powerful newspaper companies are now struggling to stay afloat in a market that has primarily moved online. But with an ever expanding and socially driven marketplace the only way to survive will be to innovate. This innovation must be driven by the mobile space and deliver news content in a way users want to read it. A new journalism model must be interactive, it must be engaging, it must be social, and it must be different.
While most companies have shifted their reporting efforts towards the online market it has not come without significant restructuring and downsizing in an attempt to maximise profits from a dwindling advertising market.1 No matter the size of the company, or the significance of their online presence, they have all been affected. The New York Times, for instance, has shed hundreds of staff since 20082 and also restructured the editing of its news service.3 These company wide cuts are despite The New York Times website receiving around 20 million unique visitors every month4. The website alone simply can’t sustain all the resources which the print edition has built up. Other major companies like The Los Angeles Times have also shed staff with almost half of their once 1200 strong workforce axed in the past 9 years.5 Another casualty is the American television network news giant ABC, which has been planning to cut up to 400 jobs from its 1500 strong staff this year.6
The big problem for news companies is that they are still thinking about how money was made during the golden years of print and broadcast. Advertising has always, for most media companies, funded quality news and investigative journalism. News is expensive but these models of journalism and revenue making cannot be directly shifted to the internet without modifying them. They must be modified to make the most of the technology available. Some websites have tried to create the ideal blend by integrating multimedia and social features but these integrations are often only surface repairs, masking an archaic structure. Adding extra content and features has often been merely an afterthought but not the focus of how the websites were designed. Most of these integrated news websites are still funded by advertising with a few exceptions. The Wall Street Journal, successfully use a subscription-based pay-wall system to fund their efforts, and others like the Australian Broadcasting Corporation are funded entirely by Government; but these are the exceptions. For other sites the ads used are still similar to the past just having taken a new form with a combination of banner, video, pop-up, viral, and text. Often these ads can crowd the layout of a website leaving only a small amount of room for journalistic content. This content is often just a replica of a story already published in another medium or has been used entirely from a newswire service. Such poor designs and approaches to online news development may explain why many news websites are seeing rapid declines in the time users spend on their sites.7
