Customer Relationship Management

Customer relationship management –

The elimination of the traditional newspaper industry

A newspaper is a publication containing news, information and advertising, traditionally printed on low-cost paper, and readers have to pay for it in order to access the content. Now the industry of traditional newspapers is facing a problem – being eliminated through competition. Crosbie (2008) predicts more than half the approximately 1,400 daily newspapers in America could have to shut down in the decade. In this essay, the causes, effects and possible solutions of the problem will be discussed.

The first cause is the weight of a newspaper. Reporting news in detail, a printed newspaper consists of a pile of paper and carries some weight. This might bring inconvenience to customers. Meanwhile, with the rise of digitalization, some internet enterprises, for examples – Google and Yahoo, provide news online. This might cause readers to turn their eyes to the internet and read news online on electronic gadgets such as smart phones, enjoying lighter weights. As a result, such internet companies have grabbed billions of advertising dollars (Kirchhoff, 2009). On the other hand, the traditional newspaper industry is shrinking due to its negligence of the preference of customers.

The second cause is the failure of the formulation of strategies to sell newspapers. On the other hand, competitors of traditional newspapers are better in this area. For example, free newspapers have taken a geographic advantage to promote their papers. Identifying people would like to read newspaper on MTR frequently, they have their papers distributed along the ways passengers going to take trains, resulting in a growth of the circulation of total unpaid dailies in the world from 200,000 in 1995 to more than 40 million halfway 2007 (Newspaperinnovation,2007).

Compared to the two causes, the first cause is more significant. There being convenience stores where newspapers are...