Turbulent change, rising competition, new ways of production and distribution, and generally new types of products have categorized the situation in the print media industry for the last few decades. It has been concluded that digitization is influencing the industry (King, 2004). It is affecting the existing market and requires new strategies (Chyi, 2002). According to the statistics, the development of the Internet has come with its significant changes to both advertisers and the audience that challenge the long-term survival of the print media, newspapers, book industries and magazines. There are various strategic management implications on the print media industry and the internet. Below are two implications:
The magazine industry remains in a monopolistic competition and is characterized by low impacts to moderate and entry level of dirt competition (Chyi, 2002). Also magazine markets are characterized with limited growth capability, and trends with business process digitalization are heading towards a greater number of titles and a decreasing average per title (King, 2004). This therefore, implies that the threats from new technologies are quite high in the magazine publishing industry.
The mother supplier of the magazine and newspaper publishing industry are freelance journalists, printing house, distributers, paper suppliers, and telemarketing companies (King, 2004). As recent development in digital advancement speed up the process of producing magazines, the Internet as such has never changed then powers and roles of any supplier group. It remains to be seen if the digital copies sold online will regenerate, there will be a transformation of the role of paper suppliers and printing houses (Chyi, 2002).
In conclusion, the Internet mainly affects the competition among the existing companies at the industry level. As the internet and digitization mainly stimulates the process and deform ways of communication, the Internet has not yet changed significantly the five forces that shape the state and nature of competition in magazine publishing industry (King, 2004). The Internet will simply add another competition weapon to the arsenal.
References:
King, L. What Makes Media Firms Tick? New York: Research Report Series (2004)
Chyi, H. An Explorative Study of Market Relationship between Online and Print Newspapers. New York: Journal of Media Economics. (2002)
