Impact of Internet on Journalism: the Newspaper Metaphor

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In 1998, Web usability expert Jakob Nielsen predicted that legacy media such
as newspapers and magazines would be replaced by integrated Internet
packages of text, video, and reference materials between 2003 and 2008.
Microsoft CEO Bill Gates predicted in 1999 that newspapers would stop making
print editions by 2018. These are only two of many forecasts of the death of
newspapers, a form of "mediacide," in the wake of the popularization of the
Internet in the past decade.
Some of these estimates must be reined in significantly since the jubilant
optimism of the Internet was crushed by the failure of many dot-com
companies in 2000. Now it appears that online news will not be an agent of
mediacide replacing print news as many have predicted. More likely, it is
going through a period of "mediamorphosis" to become a complementary medium
to traditional newspapers. However, online journalism cannot rely on
traditional models of news production, and must find its own style based on
the newspaper metaphor. This paper will examine the mediamorphosis
phenomenon and how it has created a newspaper metaphor for online journalism
that can be beneficial for traditional newspapers and new media.

Full details:
http://uts.cc.utexas.edu/~keckem/research.html