What is killing newspapers in Lagos state: the internet or dwindling economy?

Abstract

Newspapers in Switzerland and the Netherlands, have lost half of their classified adverts to the internet as reflected in an article titled: Who killed the Newspaper? in The Economist of April 24, 2006. However, in recent time, the Nigerian economy has faced a major decline that has affected the existence of newspapers. The marriage of newspapers to the web has not yet proved financially successful for the older medium (Baran, 2012). Thus, this paper examined the impact of economic recession and the internet on newspapers in Nigeria. Study adopted the survey research, sampling four hundred staff of selected newspapers and anchored on the political economy theory. Study found that seven out of ten staff of the four newspapers representing 77.4% said their daily activities are affected by the current economic recession; five out of ten staff of the four newspaper houses representing 47.3% strongly agreed that the internet has effect on the readership of printed newspaper, and four out of ten sampled representing 39.5% said that their management performed fairly during the period. It is therefore recommended that for newspaper houses to survive recession, they should relate with employees and motivate them to give their best. KEYWORDS: Print media/ownership, Political economy theory, Economic recession, Internet (Online) newspaper.