American Culture & Society

Fall 2011

NEWS IN AMERICA: IT’S CHANGING!

University of the Ryukyus

It’s a powerful force for creating popular culture.

Movies, manga, dramas, fashions, ideas.

How does a society, like America’s, shape the media?

HOW DOES MEDIA MAKE CULTURE?

Do you read newspapers regularly?

Why or why not?

Do your parents read newspapers?

How do you get your news?

HOW DO YOU USE THE NEWS?

MANY CHOICES IN PRINT

In the United States, the number of people who pay to read newspapers has been going down for more than 10 years.

Why? It is generational!People of every age read less often than people who came before them.

Let’s look at cohorts – people in 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s, etc.

FUTURE OF NEWSPAPERS

EVERYONE WONDERS

Remember the printing press? It changed everything.

Now electronic/digital communications is changing everything again. News readership began to drop with arrival of cable TV.

And now, especially, the Internet.

WHAT CHANGED?

Newspapers (and magazines) depend on advertisements to make money.

The idea: Attract readers with news and information. Then ‘sell’ the readers to advertisers.

The advertisers need to find eager, interested consumers (buyers). Reaching them through the printed media became the traditional way to do this.

ECONOMICS

Sounds good. We want to move readers from paper to pixels – to websites and blogs.

But advertisers are not happy. Why not?

People read differently.People like new forms. They don’t need news sites to interest them in ads.

Free ads for cars, houses, and jobs took away big sources of money for ‘old media’ companies.

Is this also a problem in Japan?

IS WEB THE ANSWER FOR MEDIA?

CITIZEN JOURNALISM

Is news needed for a good democracy?

Can people be happy with a million choices?

Will all news be mobile?

On screens?

Will there be new inventions after the Internet?

WHAT DO YOU THINK WILL OCCUR?