Why News Needed to Find More Channels to Get Through
It’s not a surprise to anybody that print media have been dying out for some time now. People just simply aren’t purchasing and reading newspapers like they used to.
But did you also know that news channels themselves are also starting to have to deal with dwindling viewership numbers? Your nightly news might no longer be able to support itself in the future unless they are able to find new ways to reach viewers and get them engaged. That’s why more and more news corporations are trying out novel new ways to branch out based on how people interact with technology in the current era. Why has this become a necessity?
Well, there’s a few reasons:
Increased Internet Usage and Changing Behaviors
With nearly all of our entertainment needs outsourced to the internet, fewer and fewer people are settling with the non on-demand nature of traditional television and are now choosing to get their news online. Wesley Dodd from Celebro explains that broadcasters should have high quality videos that are able to reach audiences through YouTube and Facebook. The internet has become much more centralized over time, with fewer people willing to branch away from their favorite sites.
News channels now need to be as present as possible on as many different platforms as possible to gain the attention of internet users. Most people don’t want to watch TV news, and they won’t seek it out either, so it has had to figure out a way to find viewers and go to them themselves.
How We Absorb News Is Changing
When the only option for receiving the news was in the format decided by news channels on TV, viewers didn’t have much of a choice, there simply weren’t other options. Now, if someone becomes bored or disenfranchised with how a news corporation decides to disseminate information, they can simply find another corporation willing to deliver that information in a way they like more. This can be a simple change, changing a 10 minute newscast into a 2 minute video to be posted on their Facebook page is effective as well as posting attractive headlines via Twitter to ensnare interested parties into reading entire articles.
The human attention span is shorter than ever, and news companies have had to get as much across in as little as possible before people disengage and find another source that’ll tell them what they need at the speed they want.
TV and Newspapers Are Constraining Mediums
When you’re only allowed a certain amount of air time, certain details have to be omitted that might make a story more compelling. Many people prefer online articles because there’s no limit to what the length of the article can be and as many pictures can be published as the journalist/editor want. When you move to the internet, there’s few, if any, physical limits to just how far you can cover a story besides the servers required to host the website its posted on.
The world has been evolving at a rapid pace for some time now, and news companies have had to do so as well or be swept underneath the current of change. How people interface with the media and view content has drastically shifted away from sitting down at 5 PM for the nightly news. People have changed, so the news has as well.
