Section B sample paragraph

Today with 13E we planned and wrote a sample paragraph on the following question:

Most of the traditional media’s attempts to compete with new and digital media have been too little and too late. Does your case study support this view? (48 marks)

Paragraph on paywalls

One of the key examples of traditional news media responding too slowly to new and digital technology is the issue of paywalls. It could be considered the critical error by the industry, in the late 1990s, to make all news content available for free on the internet. Originally seen as an additional marketing tool for print media, by the time institutions realised the damage new technology was doing to the print industry it was too late to stop the tide. David Simon, a former journalist and writer of The Wire, has made a compelling argument for paywalls, stating that news should be viewed as a premium product and institutions should charge accordingly. In ‘Build The Wall’ he passionately argued that the New York Times and Washington Post both needed paywalls to survive in the modern media landscape. In the UK, The Sun and The Times have introduced paywalls for their content – both are owned by Rupert Murdoch who described the internet as “the most significant change for hundreds of years”. However, audiences are largely unwilling to pay for something they can receive for free elsewhere. The Sun has tried to counter this by offering Premiership goals direct to the phone or tablet of the audience – but arguably this further devalues news content as worthless. With major news websites such as the Guardian and Mail Online still free to audiences, any paywall news site will struggle to attract audiences. Although there is a clear benefit to audiences in receiving news for free, there is also a considerable risk in that if institutions cannot charge for their product, they cannot pay for journalists to report and write the news – and therefore quality suffers. The danger is that news loses the trust that makes it so valuable, ending up more like a gossip site like TMZ in America. The Mail Online is already dominated by celebrity news and criticised widely for this.

Important: This is what you need to be able to produce if you want to get an A in the exam - and that means serious revision and preparation. You need to cover around five or six different areas or examples in answering the Section B question - the paragraph above would be just one section of the total essay.