The Example of Fanatik Newspaper Within the Context of The Evolution of Communication From Traditional Media to New Media Tools During the Covid-19 Pandemic

Abstract

Fanatik Newspaper has been chosen as a sample in explaining the evolution of communication from traditional media to new media tools during the Covid-19 pandemic period, as Fanatik uses both media platforms efficiently. During the pandemic period, in which people didn’t go out or even avoid meeting their relatives, it’s been harder to reach daily newspapers to be informed about developments. After the 1990s, humanity has already become acquainted with internet journalism, which led to a decrease in the purchase of newspapers, and people started following the developments mostly from other platforms such as computers and mobile phones. And the advent of Covid-19 increased people’s dependence to digital platforms as a result of the restrictions implemented by the states. This study includes a video interview with Ömer Necati Albayrak, who has been the editor of Fanatik since 2012, and the data collected about newspapers and online journalism during the pandemic. The meeting was originally planned to be held face-to-face, yet because of the pandemic, it had to be held over Zoom, one of the relatively new media applications. The questions asked in the interview were prepared in line with the location feature that’s in social networks (URL-1). Both qualitative and quantitative analysis methods were used in this study. With the content analysis performed with quantitative methods, information about the circulation and advertising revenues of the newspapers in Turkey in the last ten years were collected. As a result of both studies, it has been recorded that people mostly follow the news from the internet sites, however; the circulation of the newspapers, which declined at the beginning of the pandemic, increased again later. In consequence of the findings, although the evolution of communication from traditional media to new media seems to have been completed during the pandemic, it has been detected those newspapers are preferred more when it comes to advertising revenue.