This paper discusses the practice of newspapers and magazines publishing their full content online for free, which is a theory of business that is not clearly understood.
This paper relates that the practice of not charging for reading the newspaper online may be changing, as seen with companies such as AOL, ?El Pais? , which is the most popular newspaper in Spain, and ?The Economist?, which keeps almost half of the magazine to be read only through subscription. The author points out that online newspapers can publish their content internally and send it to all corners of the globe at a low cost. The paper reports that readers of online newspapers were twice as likely to be postgraduates than the general population and 59 percent were college graduates, indicating that they are likely to be an influential group in the social arena, have strong purchasing power, and are likely to be politically involved.
“Earlier the process of gathering of news, reporting and circulations were left as a centralized process in the hands of selected people. They were professional journalists and they worked together in the institutions catering to providing news across different countries. Today because of Internet and the ability of this medium to interact with public, the general user of the net has also developed the capacity of producing news instead of consuming it only as they were doing earlier. An interesting question has now come up regarding the authority, objectivity and the values that were earlier associated with journalism. This is because the functions of reporting, editing, verifying and distribution of news is no longer being left in the hands of the newsroom in the newspapers of the country alone. There are a large number of people outside who can take it up.”