Gamze Yilmaz answers: "Can traditional journalism survive in a media environment in which consumption happens mostly on social media, and sites like Buzzfeed use sensationalism and shock to increase clicks?"

The principle of journalism, no matter if online or traditional, is to create content and write articles about it. I think that traditional journalism can survive even if such a huge media environment exists, because the world does not only consist of people who use the internet, but also of older generations, who will probably stick to traditional journalism.

Surely, the online journalism predominates. On the one hand, young people, even children, use smartphones, notebooks or tablets and surf the web. Sites like “Buzzfeed“ are very eye-catching and have an appealing design. Each article has a ‘loud’ and interesting title and amusive content. Reading through one article almost 100% ensures reading at least three more articles because of the sensationalism shock that appears at the end of a page. “Buzzfeed tasty“ and similar organizations, e.g. “Tastemade“ replace cookbooks, since one can search directly for the food he or she has in mind and not browse through different cookbooks and search for the recipe first. This is, however, rather an improvement. Some online newspapers demand money for an article, but these are comparably only a few. What has to be paid on the one page could be easily found for free on a different page with a slightly different content.

On the other hand, it also happens that people do not want to keep looking at their technical devices and read texts in small format for hours. Also, the warmth and the lights of a device can be perceived as disturbing after a certain time of usage. Newspapers, by contrast, are very handy, even if a little larger. They can be folded and read whenever one wants. Nevertheless, the selection of good journalists with correspondingly high quality articles will be even more important in future, since the online competition is strong and consumers generally are expecting permanent improvements.

The newspaper, and thus traditional journalism, will never be completely replaced but will probably be reduced to major, more important and serious newspapers such as "Hamburger Abendblatt" or "Frankfurter Allgemeine" and other qualitatively similar newspapers. In my opinion, the “Bild“ will not be easily replaced by online journalism, since the newspaper is counted as entertaining, cheap and owns different and lastest news than presented on their homepage. But at the same time, social media has enough entertaining content and it does not matter if it is on Facebook, YouTube or Instagram, whereas, from my point of view, newspapers like the “Elbe Wochenblatt" could be disposed immediately. When the demand actually diminishes, it makes no sense to continue printing the paper mainly concerning the climate protection. Unlike online articles, unwanted newspapers will eventually end in garbage anyway, so why produce them? Magazines, on the contrary, will continue to be popular with topics on fitness and health, or house furnishings and garden designs. It is a common thing to do for one’s daily routine: having a tea or coffee, sitting comfortably on the sofa and browsing through magazines. This can be quite relaxing, while imagining to hold a technical device in hands instead of a magazine destroys the illusion of the perfect moment. In my judgment, the chances of magazines surviving the online journalism seems doable.

The world is in a constant change; albeit in small steps. The climate change and economics are not the only important subjects of our world, but also the labor markets, the internet and journalism. With that being said, everyone knows that older products get replaced by newer and more efficient inventions and that, of course, is a good point. Over the years, carriages were replaced by cars, DVD players substitute video cassettes, whereby DVDs slowly become replaced by online movie streaming sites, whether paid or illegal.

The competition "traditional versus online journalism" is tough and the online competition is immensely strong. In my opinion it is obvious that the internet, and therefor online journalism will eventually “win“, because the possibilities of the internet are endless. No matter which topic, one can assuredly inform oneself, and by the changes of our times, not only younger but also older generations will certainly start using the web.