The advent of TV killed Radio and now Internet is all set to give traditional news mediums such as newspapers a stiff fight that can even threaten the survivability of newspapers.
According to a Harvard University study released last week, nontraditional media websites, including aggregators, bloggers, search engines and service providers, were growing faster than news websites. The researchers at the Joan Shorenstein Centre on the Press, Politics & Public Policy studied the traffic of 160 news sites for one year, from April 2006 to April 2007.
The study said that websites of Google, Yahoo and AOL, as well as MSN and smaller sites such as topix.net, digg.com and reddit.com experienced large increases in traffic.
"Between April 2006 and April 2007, Digg's unique monthly visitors grew from under 2 million to more than 15 million," the study said, adding that Reddit and Topix grew from less than 50,000 visitors a month to more than 700,000.
However, news organisations can still prosper on the web if they can adapt, the study said.
"Local news organisations are 'brand names' within their communities, which can be used to their advantage," according to the study. "Their offline reach can also be used to drive traffic to their sites. Most important, they have a product — the news — that people want. Ironically, some news organisations do not feature the day's news prominently on their websites, forgoing their natural advantage." |
