The Newspaper Industry in a Changing Landscape The Shift in News Content of Various Newspapers as a Response to the Rise of Social Media

Neil Shen

doi:10.5539/nct.v5n1p1

Abstract

This paper examines the association between the rise of social media and the types of news content produced by newspaper outlets. Over the past two decades, the rise of social media has precipitated a decline in the role of traditional newspaper outlets. I present two hypotheses and their ensuing rationale &ndash; hypothesis one describes how newspapers may increase hard news content to further consolidate their reader base, while hypothesis two postulates that hard news content will decrease as papers try to regain the readers they lost to social media. Data was collected from two reputable and two less-reputable newspaper outlets to see how they reacted to increases in social media usage and whether their responses varied. For each newspaper outlet, the author identified the number of articles that included keywords drawn from hard news and soft news word banks. Using a ratio of hard to soft news, regression analysis was then performed. After running regression analysis with trend data from the Pew Research Center on the number of US adults with social media accounts, results indicate a moderate negative correlation amongst the two more reputable newspapers and no correlation amongst less reputable newspapers, meaning that the more reputable newspapers tended to decrease hard news content as social media became more popular.

Highlights

When the Pew Research Center began tracking social media use in America amongst adults in 2005, only 5 percent used at least one social media platform
In order to examine whether hard news content amongst various newspapers have increased over time alongside the rise in popularity of social media, this article uses word banks to measure the number of articles containing hard news and soft news, comparing how the instances of words varies across the period of social media proliferation
While correlation does not necessarily lead to causation in cases filled with as much theorization as this, the reasoning for why more reputable newspapers would do this does seem to hold up given that social media giants are emerging as one of the largest competitors to their business

Summary

Introduction

When the Pew Research Center began tracking social media use in America amongst adults in 2005, only 5 percent used at least one social media platform. By 2011, a mere six years later, that number had soared to 50 percent. Over 72 percent of all American adults – over 183 million individuals – actively use at least one social media platform (Pew Research Center, 2019). To be sure, this has permitted users to do all sorts of things they would never have been able to before. The proliferation of social media may have yielded unintended consequences

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