Back in July, I wrote a post on The Times’ decision to charge for online content. Today, it’s been announced that visits to the website have fallen by 87%. According to figures on the BBC, the Times Online has registered 2.7m unique users last month compared to its 21m unique users per month earlier in the year.

This, coupled with the story that claims newspapers are set to vanish by 2020, shows our nationals are in for some changes. The internet has already had quite an impact on our papers and leads us to question what’s on the horizon. At this point, it is hard to know what to expect but I find it hard to envisage other nationals putting up a paywall. Let’s wait and watch this space…

This post was written by Charlotte.

Spotted via Twitter, I found this article in the Washington Post particularly interesting. It discusses the evolving newsroom in the US which also brings challenges that resonate on this side of the pond. He makes two very good points:

Point 1 – Back in the day, a traditional newsroom had three types of jobs: reporter, editor and photographer. With the rise of all things digital, new titles have appeared: multiplatform idea triage specialist and deputy director of word-flow management and video branding strategy, to name a few. Is there really a need for fancy new titles that mean nothing to no one? What does a multiplatform idea triage specialist actually do?

Point 2 – Online headlines are no longer designed to catch the reader’s eye. What they are designed for is SEO, and they’re often changed to something utilitarian – as I have demonstrated in the title of this post. Can you imagine The Sun without their brand-defining (and often funny) pun headlines? So we don’t forget what we could be missing, here are a couple of great ones taken from Friday’s paper:
– We’ve saved her ass (the story about rescuing the parasailing donkey)
– Fish Fingaaghs (the story about a man accidentally filleting UK’s rarest fish)
– Stumphenge (the story about the timber ring found near Stonehenge)

It is interesting to see how the internet has affected the business of journalism, but let’s hope that the things that make “traditional media” special don’t get pushed aside in the digital wave. I firmly believe there’s room for both.

This post was written by Charlotte.