BBC, Guardian, and Times - Essay Example

Guardian News and Times have a monthly reach of 9.6 and 7.9 million respectively (The Guardian, 2012).

However, due to the advancement in technology, there are many options for people to select from the sources of news. Besides TV, radio, and newspapers, there is now internet which provides the latest news at any given time of the day free of cost. This increasing trend has forced companies to focus just as much on their online presence. The newspaper industry is losing its audience to the internet as people are no longer willing to pay for news that they can easily access online for free. Thus, in order to survive, the news companies are not spending a big amount to maintain an audience both online and offline.

A different strategy was adopted by all three of the news companies to compete with each other. BBC was quick in coming up with an online strategy given its vast audience. The company soon announced its decision to go “digital” under the leadership of Entwistle. The introduction of iPlayer proved to be quite successful both, for the network as well as the VOD market (Andrews, 2012). The main strategy of the company was to focus on vision, audio and music, and the digital future media division (Andrews, 2012). The global audience for BBC online is estimated to be 30 million (Horrocks, 2012).

Guardian, on the other hand, completely embraced online media and decided to become “a digital-first organization” in 2011 (The Guardian, 2011). The company announced that it will be posting complete material online and increasing its investment in maintaining an audience online as it is the future’s demand. The company is now focusing on reaching out to more people through the internet and mobile phones and making efforts to improve its digital services since the entire newspaper industry has been suffering due to this major shift in user preferences (The Guardian, 2011). The guardian is presently the fifth most visited news site in the world with over 30 million online readers (Holiday, 2011).

The Times, however, has taken a different perspective in mind. Given that online users are less likely to pay for material that can be accessed for free, the company adopted a strategy to charge only loyal customers, i.e. customers that read more than 20 articles. The company has announced a number of packages for subscriptions for iPad, mobiles phones, and web access. This way the company will not drive away customers who are not frequent users while the loyal group will be charged to access more articles (Peters, 2011).

All three of the above-mentioned companies have taken a very different approach in order to survive in the industry. The changing user preferences have made it necessary for newspaper companies to come up with new innovative ideas so that they can face challenges resulting from the changing environment. All three companies have been able to survive possibly the worst decade for the newspaper industry and in order to stay in business, they must continue maintaining their online presence.