Feedback
Fantastic essay – feedback as promised:
PANDYA, Kishan
Mark: 39
Grade: A
WWW: Fundamentally, this is a superb essay. Your engagement with the issues and debates raised is genuine and you offer depth and insight throughout. You have some superb quotes in there and a wide variety of examples. Above all, there is a high degree of critical autonomy and I genuinely enjoyed reading it – the classic signifier of an A grade essay!
EBI: There are certainly a few area we can look to improve:
I’m not convinced you always show ‘sharp focus on the question’ – a key signifier for the top level. The wording in the question is ‘consumption and production’ and while you clearly use these words in several places perhaps not throughout.
Similarly, you could make your case study clearer in the opening and in fact I think your second paragraph actually lays out the argument much more effectively than the first. For the exam in the summer you’ll also have to add your independent case study to the mix too.
One key area I notice you are missing is statistics – you reference decline and growth but don’t have the statistics to support this. I think this is a relatively easy thing to add and yet would give the essay a lot more weight to the argument.
I think you could make more of the section on paywalls and the potential dangers of journalism as a force for good (‘holding truth to power’) declining permanently.
One error: smartphones weren’t around for Rodney King – it was an old camcorder! Don’t make this mistake in future assessments (and perhaps use some more relevant examples – Eric Garner ‘I can’t breathe’ etc.)
LR: Research the statistics you need to show the decline in the newspaper industry (and any other relevant stats such as the amount of classified advertising revenue newspapers have lost) so you can add this to future assessments. Document them in a new blogpost along with this feedback.
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Circulation
After posting slight gains last year, both weekday and Sunday circulation fell around 3% from 2013 to 2014, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of Alliance for Audited Media (AAM) data. The decline in weekday circulation fell almost equally across all categories. This includes top tier newspapers (those with average weekday circulation of 500,000 or more) whose weekday circulation fell 4% in 2014 after seeing a 22% spike from 2012 to 2013. In Sunday circulation, top-tier papers felt less of a blow than others in 2014.
Readership
Although the public conversation about newspapers focuses on the shift to digital, most newspaper reading still happens in print. According to readership data from Nielsen Scarborough’s 2014 Newspaper Penetration Report, 56% of those who consume a newspaper read it exclusively in print, while 11% also read it on desktop or laptop computers; 5% also read it on mobile; and another 11% read it in print, on desktop and on mobile. In total, more than eight-in-ten of those who read a newspaper do so in print, at least sometimes. Only 5% read newspapers exclusively on mobile devices.
The general demographics of newspaper readers remain consistent as well. The most likely to read newspapers are those with more education or more income, and who are white.
Economics
For the past five years, newspaper ad revenue has maintained a consistent trajectory: Print ads have produced less revenue (down 5%), while digital ads have produced more revenue (up 3%) – but not enough to make up for the fall in print revenue. Overall ad revenue fell 4%, to just $19.9 billion.
Total employment in newspaper publishing has dropped by more than 40 percent in the last 10 years. In 2001, the industry had employed 414,000 people, but that number fell to 246,020 people by 2011. What’s more, much of that decline has taken place in just the last three years, suggesting that the industry is growing increasingly unstable even as the economy as a whole makes modest gains.
