MEDIA DISRUPTIONS IN THE DIGITAL ERA: CONSEQUENCES FOR TOTAL NEWSPAPER MANAGEMENT

The internet came with disruptive tools that have helped much to articulate and integrate some of the mind burgling innovations in media production and management. This has not been witnessed before. The disruptions have transformed life, media business and the global economy; making multimedia and online journalism and web newspaper publishing possible. This paper anchors on Schumpeter’s (1942) creative destruction theory and Clayton Christensen’s (1997) disruptive innovation theory. It adopts the qualitative conceptual study framework to examine the advent of the internet technology as a consequence of digitization and digital transformation and how it disrupted the traditional media production process including the printing technology and its newspaper press production process and ushers in a revolutionary trajectory in the mass media production and distribution system. The paper relied on secondary data sources to discuss concepts such as the newspaper press, the total newspaper concept, the changing media management landscape, timeline in technological disruptions in media communication, digitization, digitalization and digital transformation, multimedia and online journalism, media digital disruptions and the total newspaper concept. The paper argues that the internet made “media convergence” possible on the World Wide Web and provided other interactive accessories that creatively destroyed and innovatively disrupted the distinct, disparate and separate media production processes of the newspaper, radio and television and converge them on the World Wide Web as web or online newspaper