Media Convergence: Rise Of Newspaper Subscription Billing System

Media Convergence
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Introduction
Media convergence is a term that can refer to either: 1) the merging of previously distinct media technologies and media forms due to digitization and computer networking; or 2) an economic strategy in which the media properties owned by communications companies employ digitization and computer networking to work together CITATION Xin17 \l 1033 (Wu, Zheng, & Wu, 2017). Lately, the mass media industry has been grappling to keep up to remain profitable ventures in the face of the changing technology. Though at first most media houses especially in print failed to embrace technology as the ‘future’ and align its business model with it, eventually, they have been forced to embrace technology. The one factor that the print industry especially newspaper and magazines cannot compete with the development of technologies the media convergence has created is the way information is collected and disseminated. In the digital age, printed information is irreversible and unchangeable and it cannot compete against information which changes in real-time with the developing of news events that can be updated at will.
Newspapers and Media Convergence
Media convergence in the newspaper industry has come in the age of the internet. Newspapers were a revolutionary mass media channel before the advent of the Radio and TV. Even in the age of the radio and tv, newspapers struggled to keep up and they continued to expand. With the advent of the internet, the resilience of the newspaper industry could not compete against the digital media which revolutionized the way people accessed information. The internet, however, changed the way people access and consume information. The most disruptive internet technology which compelled the newspaper industry to change its business models was the social media coupled with the invention of smartphones. Social media and smartphones allow people to collect and share multimedia content on the social media platforms which could reach millions in an instance creating citizen journalism which seemed to be more up-to-date and free to the consumers CITATION Jam18 \l 1033 (Creech, 2018). The edge the traditional media outlets had as the only source of credible news was lost and the newspaper industry was forced to adapt. In many instances, the media houses started getting news leads from social media CITATION New11 \l 1033 (Newman, 2011). People were no longer reading newspapers for their informative and newsworthy content because they barely ‘provided any new information.’
Circulation of newspapers slumped and the news organizations running daily and even weekly newspapers started to struggle to make ends meet because readership and ad revenue continued to drop. They had to embrace and leverage on technology to stay afloat and most of the newspaper organizations which did not go bust established websites and marketed them aggressively. They also created social media accounts where they had to interact with their readers and use the platforms as leads to their websites. Most newspaper organizations today have websites and one of their main sources of revenue is either running ads on their websites or subscr...