Interview with Jaice Yang: Will technology replaced printed newspaper?

    When I was young and my family took me to the restaurant for lunch, I would always be bored because all I saw was people holding their newspaper high and nobody talked to me. However, when I went back recently and went to the same restaurant, people, including my parents were now looking down at their tablet. All of a sudden, I discovered that all the newspaper posts had gone and printed newspapers were diminishing every second. This raised my interest in determining if the printed newspaper would be replaced by technology very soon. In order to solve this mystery, I decided to interview Ms Yang, a professor at Texas State University School of Journalism Massive Communication. Interestingly, her opinions stated that printed newspaper should not go extinct any time soon.

        According to Ms Yang, old and established technology will co-exist with the newly emerged technology. She provided an example, radio. She stated that when the television became popular, people were concerned about the future of radio. However, the radio “…[had] reinvented itself,” and nowadays satellite radio are everywhere. Then, she mentioned that the rapid improvement of the Internet had again threatened the existence of television. Ms Yang believed that such concern was not necessary because to date, television and radio could still be found everywhere in the world. She confidently believed that the printed newspaper should follow the trend of radio and television and it should not be replaced soon.

        The concept Ms Yang described was clear and simple. However, the practical approach would be a challenging process for developing a co-existing printed newspaper form. Ms Yang was optimistic about the challenges. She claimed that, in fact, many of the printed newspaper company “had been doing so” because newspapers were now distributed through websites and apps on smart devices.

 thought that at the current state, the invention of new products was not the major concern for the company but rather the management of several products. She illustrated this point with the example of the Coca-Cola Company. She stated that in order to succeed, the Coca-Cola Company had developed several other products such as Sprite and Diet-Coke. The newspaper company should manage and differentiate their products among website newspaper, printed newspaper, and app. If these products are similar, she implied that the existence of these products was just redundant. The most important problem the printed newspaper should be working on is to develop a distinctive feature for each product.

        Additionally, Ms Yang claimed that the printed company should recruit new Journalists who have mastered both the traditional and web languages. Her reason was that the newspaper companies seldom change their structure and outfit of the website. A change usually occurred in two to three years. Although she agreed that people would complain the change of website required a long time to adapt to and frequent change only confused the user, Ms Yang supported her opinion with Facebook management. She said that many Facebook users were upset with the frequent change of Facebook website interface. However, she claimed that each time the change actually improved the user experience of the website. The newspaper company’s failure to change would imply that the performance neither improved nor decreased. In order to attract additional viewers, the company should also train the journalism to study the web language. Ms Yang said that the traditional school of journalism did not allow their students to expose to web data and language. The training could improve the variety of the content in the website.

        Listening to Ms. Yang’s opinions, I was convinced that the printed newspaper should not be replaced soon. Her opinions were interesting to me because I always thought that the printed newspaper industry had already shrunk and collapsed. Ms Yang’s statements were optimistic and triggered my expectations about how the newspaper companies could transform and adapt to the modern user.