Bianca David

I chose to talk about Paul Bradshaw’s article How Digital Media Changes Are Affecting Local Media, posted on onlinejournalismblog.com. The article also appeared in print in the January edition of Government Gazette. Paul Bradshaw is a regular contributor to Online Journalism Blog. He also lectures in online journalism at Birmingham City University.

The article focuses on three main ways in which local media – content and coverage as well as advertising – are being affected by the internet and the huge changes happening in digital media. “The first big change that local media are facing,” Bradshaw writes, “is the ‘decoupling’ of elements that they previously packaged for profit: a platform, content, and advertising. Online, those elements have become increasingly separate.” Bradshaw is referring to the fact that, because of the nature of online media, people are able to pick and choose which elements and articles they want to consume without having to buy the whole package, as with a magazine or a newspaper.

Bradshaw goes on to briefly talk about how advertising and content are also becoming “decoupled”. He doesn’t go into depth at all, and although he says this separation of advertising and content is what is most important in the whole “decoupling” phenomenon, I have a hard time understanding what he’s talking about.

Bradshaw points out that with the emergence of online journalism, advertisers are cutting out the middlemen. “The enormous competition online, coupled with low cost bases, means advertising is cheap,” Bradshaw says. And, because of the enormous competition online, the nature of advertising has changed when it comes to the internet. Advertisers don’t have to buy space next to content anymore; they can choose to advertise in ways that promise more results: “pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, for instance, only costs an advertiser money when someone clicks on an advert (this is the model that Google uses). Pay-per-action (PPA) only costs an advertiser money when someone takes action by, for example, booking an appointment.”

The problem with online advertising is that, while the advertisers are saving money by posting ads online, local publishers make more profit by selling ads in print. Naturally, Bradshaw says, there is no incentive for them to sell web ads.

The last thing that Bradshaw covers in the article is the ‘hyperlocal’ phenomenon. Bradshaw writes that websites and other publications have been emerging to cover areas that national media neglects, areas such as human interest, crime, and other very local matters.

With the conglomeration of the media that happened largely in the last 20 years, local news hasn’t been getting the coverage it used to. Many people think that returning to more extensive coverage of local news will be the saving grace of traditional print publications.