Many aspects of journalism have changed over the course of 2020 due to the growing crisis of print newspapers in the post-pandemic scenario. Print has been abandoned, reinstalling itself on platforms for managing and publishing subscriptions and with subscriptions to information emails, giving rise to a real revival of newsletters. Every decline is always accompanied by a parallel rise of something else: this was the case for music, when cassettes gave birth to the CD first then to Spotify, and more recently for video entertainment, with the crisis mainstream television and the success of Netflix and other similar platforms. Today, the same scheme could also be applied to the world of information: the gradual decline of newspapers is seeing the emergence of new tools for the dissemination, transmission and retrieval of information , first and foremost newsletters. So why do we speak of “renewal”?
Because in reality, newsletters have always been an essential tool for attracting the public and conveying information, and their birth is historically long before traditional newspapers. The Acta Diurna ("Daily Events") was published in 131 BC. Since then, the newsletters have not stopped circulating, crossing the different historical periods (2) with different Image Masking Service forms and purposes and today, more than 2000 years later, we are witnessing a whole new life of this channel of information. How the epidemic has changed the world of information The beginning of the crisis of the traditional media It was 2007 when two seemingly insignificant events marked the beginning of the crisis in the traditional news world: the facebook boom the presentation of the first iPhone.
These are the two historical facts that have gradually led to the crisis of the traditional world of information and to a new mode of transmission, retrieval and dissemination of information, in which: the narration of reality has gone from being the absolute prerogative of traditional media to that of being produced and disseminated by the users themselves . Smartphones and social media have made the news literally at your fingertips, and news can be told and passed on by anyone newspapers began to lose exclusive control over the dissemination of information and their role as sole sources of information information retrieval methods have gone digital, becoming much faster and more immediate . The web has given users the ability to get information in real time, making news a need that print will never be able to satisfy. The print newspaper crisis reached significant dimensions in a decade, even before the Covid pandemic, with dramatic effects on the journalistic labor market. According to the Pew Research Center, in the US scenario alone, the printing industry lost half of its employees from 2008 to 2019: