\u201cHey, have you seen the BuzzFeed video I shared on Facebook yesterday?\u201d<\/p>\n
Instead of saying \u201cHey, have you seen the headline for the newspaper yesterday?\u201d, nowadays a daily conversation between two friends often begins with discussing the trending articles\/topics on BuzzFeed and other social media sites. The Internet has been selected as one of the most important inventions in human history. It brings us convenience, provides us a chance to connect with the rest of the world at our fingertips, further accelerates the evolution of print journalism, and starts a new chapter for digital journalism.<\/p>\n
When looking specifically at the way content is distributed to audiences, from the beginning of 1800s to the 21st<\/sup> century, the development of newspaper can be divided into three main eras, Push, Pull, and the combination of Push and Pull. The Push era started with the birth of traditional journalism and newspapers. The word \u201cPush\u201d essentially means providing content, or pushing content toward its audience. For instance, news reporters will pursue and generate stories that are assigned by their editors and the audience will become a receiver of the stories and information provided by the newspaper. In the Push era, advertisement plaid an important role in the way newspapers operated. Aside from annual subscription fees, advertisements became a major revenue source for the newspapers. Take prominent newspaper, The Huffington Post, as an example; in order to attract audiences of all types to read its newspaper, The Huffington Post delivers new stories and content on a wide variety of topics such as \u201cPolitics, business, entertainment, environment, technology, popular media, lifestyle, culture, comedy, healthy living, women\u2019s interests, and local news\u201d through multiple platforms. (\u201cThe Huffington Post\u201d, 2013) Huffington Post\u2019s online website generates huge levels of viewership, making it extremely valuable to advertisers seeking high-visibility advertising space. Its\u2019 uncanny ability to attract viewership valued it at above 300 million at the time it was sold to its current parent company, AOL.<\/p>\n In 2014, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of Alliance for Audited Media (AAM) data, \u201cboth weekday and Sunday circulation of newspapers fell around 3% from the previous year.\u201d (Barthel, 2015) With the decline of circulation, newspapers and journalists were trying to develop new ways to attract the audience. Demand Media, an Internet and content driven company based in Santa Monica, California, serves as an example of the Pull era. Owning online website eHow and Cracked, Demand Media is known for its ability to generate content based on its audiences\u2019 needs, and enables its content creators to reach larger audiences in various categories. Demand Media\u2019s \u201ceHow\u201d website owns massive amounts of articles and more than 2 million videos for its users to find answers to their questions and encourage its users to share their experiences with each other. By means of extensive research, Demand Media understands what kind of content its users need, and creates websites based on its category. The company also believes that content wouldn\u2019t survive without community and conversation. Besides the website eHow, which focuses on topics such as cooking recipes, decorations and lifestyles, Demand Media has also created the on-line website \u201cCracked\u201d in order to fulfill the needs of the younger generation and audiences who are interested in light-hearted content.<\/p>\n Although Demand Media and its content-driven websites have been very successfully in the first few years, critics have cast doubt on Demand Media and other similar websites\u2019 abilities to \u201cplace search engine optimization goals over factual relevance\u201d in order to obtain high amount of revenue in advertising. Through multiple analysis on Google search and the realization of what content is needed by the mass public, Demand Media utilizes its freelancers to create fast and cheap content. It is using the quantity over quality strategy. \u201cNo need for quality content produced by well-paid journalists: if you know how to perform search engine optimization, your low quality, rapidly-produced video or “article” will top Google’s results and dwarf playing-by-the-book regular media’s traffic.\u201d (Decugis, 2011)<\/p>\n With the birth of the Internet, more and more people, especially younger generation, prefer to consume news online relative to the percentage of people who consume news via television. Nonetheless, the percentage of people who consume news on the Internet, which 40%, is still 30% lower when compared to the percentage of people who consume news on the television, which is 70%. The percentage of people who consume news on the Internet is continuing to rise, while on the other hand, the percentage of people who consume news on the television is continuing to fall throughout the years. (Grabowicz, 2014) In both the Push and Pull eras there has existed a one-way communication between newspaper and its audiences. In the Push era, reporters and newspapers possess the bargaining power between the communications. The audience accepted and received news content that was selected and being processed by the newspapers. In the Pull era, the audience retrieved the bargaining power; they have the say in what content should be produced.<\/p>\n