Newspapers are the oldest mass media and are thus the root of much of the ‘common sense’ of other media industries which developed later.
Industry structures: circulations, subscriptions, funding, and what these mean for content.
Prepare by reading pdf below.
McManus, J. (1995) A market-based model of news production. Communication Theory, 5(4):301-338
“Newspapers have always been linked to ‘modern lifestyles’ - their forms adapt to the way people live their lives. The ‘commuter free sheet’ is one of those new(ish) breeds that may be under threat from COVID-19 as the the relationship of many workers to their workplaces changes.”
Media producers are still looking for ways to make best use of ‘the internet’ as a distribution platform; the BuzzFeed / Vice etc model doesn’t seem to have worked out as a good long-term strategy: