On The Digitizing Of The U.S. Newspaper Industry

The Newspaper industry in the U.S. has gone through prior periods of boom and bust since 1830s. However, for this time, the U.S. newspaper industry is suffering through what could be its worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. Advertising revenues are plummeting due to the severe economic downturn, while readership habits are changing as consumers turn to the Internet for free news and information. Some major newspaper chains are even burdened by heavy debt loads. Therefore, it's important and urgent for newspaper to find a way out of such dilemma, the way it to invent a digital journalism and new services for newspaper readers, in order to draw their attention again.This dissertation is a case study of the famous New York Times, Wall Street Journal and USA Today, which is conducted through three parts:the cyberspace, the mobile field, and the organizational change of newspaper industry. This dissertation is divided into five chapters. The first chapter mainly introduces the background of this study with a literature review on three relative topics:the relationship between traditional media and new media, the transformational change in the newspaper industry and the invention of digital newspaper. It suggests that newspapers'such digital transformation could be attributed to the financial crisis it underwent and the pursuit of economic interest. The second chapter reviews the situation of U.S. newspaper industry, especially New York Times, Wall Street Journal and USA Today with a social and media ecology perspective, it also analyses why U.S. newspaper industry has suffered such financial crisis, and what kinds of transitions the U.S. newspaper industry has gone through in this digital age. The third chapter uses the diffusion of innovation theory to analyses the diffusion of American online newspapers, including its diffusion process, adopter categories, and the re-invention characteristics of New York Times, Wall Street Journal and USA Today. The fourth chapter discusses the remedial function of "media-in-motion", such as cellphone and PDA, it also focuses on the three levels of mobile services and the new send-reccive model in mobile field. The fifth chapter studies the features of newspaper organizations, and the internal reasons and external reasons for newspaper organizational change. The conclusion part sums up five key words that run through the whole process of U.S. newspaper digital development; it concludes that the convergence of newspaper and new media is not only a current necessity but also a future trend.