Paywalls

For

Q. What does David Simon mean by ‘slow suicide’?

David Simon means that the industry will continue to collapse until everyone swallows hard and goes behind a paywall. Or that eventually the newspaper industry will die out unless people agree to paywalls.  

Q. Why does he mean by saying anti-paywall people “don’t understand the first thing about actual journalism”?

They do not understand how much money It costs to cover a story or to place reporters at key points where stories are. Basically that without paywalls it will be harder to cover decent stories. 

Q. What does he mean by “journalism is a profession”?

That it requires a lot of hard work and people. These people needing paying and in order for that to happen people need to pay for online products as well as physical. 

Q. What do you think made 1 million people pay for the NYT(New York Times)?

"offer one of the best newspaper experience and an award-winning newspaper" - Albert, The New York Times help service  

"loyal" "best content possible" "good quality" - Briana, The New York Times help service 

Against

Q. What does he mean by “Band-Aid to cover a bullet hole”?

The newspaper industry is already dying and using paywalls is only a short term solution that will not fix the entire problem 

Q. How much would you pay for Facebook (or any other social network)? Why this much?

I would not pay any money for these social network sites because there will always be at least one social network site/app that is free. However if all social network sites started to charge then I would possibly pay a small amount of money depending on the amount of social network sites I use (e.g. £1 for each social network and use 5 different apps/sites)

Q. What would make you pay to read a newspaper? (Value-added content)

Content that applies to me and what I care about or something I can only get from this newspaper and not any others. If these factors do not apply to a newspaper then there would be no point of paying for it when there are options of getting the news that are free. 

Which news values apply in the story? Give a range of examples and make specific reference to theory including Galtung and Ruge and narrative (Levi-Strauss). Consider the role of ideology.

https://www.standard.co.uk/news/london/school-at-base-of-grenfell-tower-reopened-48-hours-after-fire-because-education-too-important-to-a3668561.html

In the news story ‘School at base of Grenfell Tower reopened 48 hours after fire as 'education too important to halt', head teacher says’ the news values negativity, threshold, proximity, and personalisation. News values are the values that news professionals use to decide whether a news story is worthy or not. Galtung and Ruge came up with the idea of news values as they argued that news was structured according to unspoken values rather than simply being discovered. 

The first news value in this article is negativity. The news value of negativity is when bad (negative) stories are favoured over positive stories. This is negative because the Grenfell tower fire was a tragedy due to the amount of deaths and the amount of people affected. The evening standard could have chosen any story, including more positive ones, but they choose one about the Grenfell tower tragedy due to them knowing it would attract more readers than a happier story.

The next news value is threshold. Threshold is the size of an event for it to be considered newsworthy which are usually commonly occurring tragic events. The Grenfell tower fire is a story that continues to be covered due to how shocking it was as well as all of the different facts that keep being discovered. This story in particular was probably covered due to it being hard to believe the school would reopen only 2 days after the incident when many of the students lived in the tower. The shocking nature of this story therefore makes it newsworthy.

Proximity is the next news value presented in this story. Proximity means how close to home a news story is. For example, a news story closer to home is more likely to be covered than a news story further away although it is usually ideologically closer rather than physically (e.g. a story in Australia will more likely be covered than one in Africa due to the ideological proximity despite being further away). The Grenfell tower fire was physically close to home so therefore got a lot of news coverage. Also, the school that reopened was physically close to the tower which only added to the surprise of it reopening. 

The last news value presented in this article is personalisation which is when a news story is personalized for human interest. This article is personalised as they could have used any story from the Grenfell tower incident but decided to use one about a school reopening just 48 hours after the fire. This causes a reader to feel shocked and surprised about the headline so they'll want to read the article in order to find out more about the story. However, if they had used a different story or headline people may have been uninterested and not wanted to read about it. 

To conclude the news values in this article are negativity, threshold, proximity, and personalisation. This story is shocking, close to home and has many things to cover to therefore fits all of these news values.

Report: 0.7 percent of terror victims in Western Europe

The statistic in the news story are very shocking due to the fact that we hardly hear of terror attacks outside of the west so therefore finding out that only 0.7% of attacks happen here is a shock. This seems unfair considering tens of thousands of attacks happen in the middle east and Asia compared to only a few hundred in western Europe. This proves the fact that many newspapers tend to ignore stories from outside of developed countries due to ideologies that these stories are 'not as important' despite being more frequent. This is because newspapers may not think the general pubic care about a terror attack in Iraq as much as they would about a terror attack in London due to the news value of proximity. This could be due to 'otherness' in which groups of people different from us, in this case people in developing countries, are treated differently and possibly with less respect. Therefore I doubt that this news story would be covered in mainstream UK news as thing such as the proximity and threshold are not what UK newspapers would consider 'important' or 'correct'.

pros and cons

	pros	cons
Hire more journalists to cover a bigger range of events.	A wider range of stories means a wider audience will buy the newspaper	Costs money to pay the journalists to do their jobs
Sack journalists	Less money is spent on paying journalists	Less stories may get published meaning the audience might stop reading
Put up ‘paywall’	People have to pay in order to read the news online therefore money is being made online as well as selling	People might not wan to pay so will just go to a website where the news is free
Make journalists tweet more.	keeps people in social media up to date	Journalists are not able to do their jobs as they are spending a lot of time tweeting
Make journalists write about celebrities more.	Gets a younger audience to start reading the newspaper	People who are not interested may stop reading
Increase cost of paper	the higher the cost the more money the company gets	people might buy a cheaper news paper with similar stories
Ask readers to write more stories (for free)	Don't have to pay journalists to write stories	will have no stories if no readers decide to write any
Shut down your paper (go online only)	Save money on printing	limits the audience to people who go online a lot rather than those who don't such as older people
Decrease price of newspaper (or make it free)	could increase the sales meaning they make just as much money or more. Or make money from adverts	if there is no change in the amount of buyers then profits will go down
Put more ‘sponsored content’ online and in your paper.	Get money from the people who the content is sponsored by	People might get sick of sponsored content and swap to a paper with less.

Pattern of consumption

I check the news on social media such as twitter and snapchat daily as well as listening to the news on the radio just so that I can keep up to date. However, these often do not give a lot of information so if I find a news story I find interesting I will look it up online and find it on a news website such as BBC News or The Daily Mail. I watch the news on TV with my family at least once a week (usually a Friday) however, I sometimes watch it more often if i am not doing anything else. Every Saturday I buy two different newspapers (The Sun and The Daily Mail) to give to customers while they are waiting at the hair dressers I work at. I sometimes also read them while there are no customers if I have no other work to do. Lastly I read the news when it comes up automatically on my laptop when I open up the internet. If I see a headline that I want to read more about all I have to do it click it and I am take to the story which makes reading the news a lot easier.