Digital Media: The Modern Age Newspaper
In the past decade, Media companies have witnessed a drastic decrease in the sales of print media. The reason for that is the advancement of technology and people shifting to digital newsletter for their daily dose of global update. The rate in which this is growing is accounting to losses for News companies. The overall revenue of digital news is increasing but not to that extent as compared to the damages incurred due to the decrease in sales of printed newsletters.
Advertising revenues of US Newspapers
(Millions)
| Year | Online | Total | |
| 2003 | $44,939 | $1,216 | $46,155 |
| 2004 | $46,703 | $1,541 | $48,244 |
| 2005 | $47,408 | $2,027 | $49,435 |
| 2006 | $46,611 | $2,664 | $49,275 |
| 2007 | $42,209 | $3,166 | $45,375 |
| 2008 | $34,740 | $3,109 | $37,848 |
| 2009 | $24,821 | $2,743 | $27,564 |
| 2010 | $22,795 | $3,042 | $25,838 |
| 2011 | $20,692 | $3,249 | $23,941 |
| 2012 | $18,931 | $3,370 | $22,314 |
Source: Newspaper Association of America
News UK is the publisher of The Times, The Sunday Times and The Sun newspapers. In 2008, this company had four data centers in London which contained 931 servers in 170 racks. News UK was running out of space for the piling data. At the end of 2008, the firm partnered with HCL Tech (www.hcltech.com) to provide solutions for the following problems:
- Prepare the company to sustain in a post-newspaper world –
Apart from outstanding journalism, News UK had to generate revenue by making users subscribe to their online content. The firm realized it needed an agile, scalable and elastic infrastructure. After implementing a better infrastructure, News UK received positive results and became the first ever group in the country to charge for online content and generated 1, 50,000 subscribers for the digital version of The Times and The Sunday Times.
- Optimize existing IT
News UK lost a staggering $21 million dollars on data centers. This problem was also solved by creating a single centralized cloud data center.
- Replacing end-of-life systems
News UK’s infrastructure was long due of rebooting and refreshing; the delay had resulted in frequent outage. The infrastructure was finally refreshed which resulted in maximum benefit in IT field for the company.
With the assistance of HCL (www.hcltech.com) News UK was able to rectify and modify its website and data centers which resulted in savings of millions of dollars and an efficient online system which generated more revenue than ever before.
