Taking the Paper Out of News

Abstract

Using in-depth interviews, newsroom observation, and internal documents, this case study presents and analyses changes that have taken place at Finnish financial daily Taloussanomat since it stopped printing on 28 December 2007 to focus exclusively on digital delivery via the Web, email, and mobile. It reveals the savings that can be achieved when a newspaper no longer prints and distributes a physical product; but also the revenue lost from subscriptions and print advertising. The consequences of a newspaper's decision to go online-only are examined as they relate to its business model, website traffic, and editorial practice. The findings illustrate the extent to which the medium rather than the content it carries determines news consumption patterns, show the differing attention a newspaper and its online substitute command, and reveal the changes to working patterns journalists can expect in the online-only environment.

Negotiating Professional News Judgment and “Clicks”

“…This illustrates both that a great deal of the time users seem to be in tune with the journalistic selection and that journalistic judgments are still the norm. Compared to other research that often points out and/or illustrates the potential of audience metrics and clicks (see, e.g., O'Neill & Harcup 2009;Phillips et al 2010, Thurman & Myllylahti 2009), the present study finds the effect, so far, to be heavily moderated by journalists and their news judgment. These findings may also be due to the specific media system, Democratic Corporatist (Hallin & Mancini 2004), where the press historically have been less commercialized as compared to the liberal system, although the division between commercial and public service media, as elaborated below, appears to be more important.…”

“…Thurman and Myllylahti (2009) report, in a study on a Finnish newsroom, that the traffic the site gets was a factor in writing and selecting stories. If traffic was slow, an attractive news story could be posted to get the numbers up.…”

“…Together, these two developments imply that algorithms automatically can produce news at the expense of journalists -a practice that has been labelled robot journalism (van Dalen 2012). Although this algorithmic conception of the audience (Anderson 2011) and news production could very well be a major factor reshaping contemporary news production, journalism research has so far focused surprisingly little attention on the issue, although there are some exceptions (see, e.g., Anderson 2011;Bakker 2012;van Dalen 2012;MacGregor 2007;O'Neill & Harcup 2009;Thurman & Myllylahti 2009). Though technology does indeed shape journalism, it does not do so -as pointed out by several researchers (Boczkowski 2005;van Dalen 2012;Karlsson, 2011;Karlsson & Clerwall, 2012) -unconditionally.…”

Interactivity on Swedish newspaper websites: What kind, how much and why?

“…Among other things, it was suggested that print media especially would not fare well in the new digital era (Thurman and Myllylahti, 2009). Beliefs were also aired that the interactive potential of the internet would come to change, or at least influence, the practice of journalism, moving it from a one-to a two-way communication process (Chung, 2007(Chung, , 2008Hujanen and Pietikainen, 2004), leveling the playing field between journalist and reader, sender and receiver.…”

Mixed-Methods Communication Research: Combining Qualitative and Quantitative Approaches in the Study of Online Journalism

“…In the study of the Finnish newspaper Taloussanomat (Thurman & Myllylahti, 2009), the phenomenon under investigation-newspapers dropping their print edition and going online-only-was too uncommon to support a wider comparative study. The case study approach offered a means to describe, in some detail, this novel case, and to analyse its implications for the future of news in print.…”