Media Discovery Discovered

Magazines or newspapers 10 years ago used to be just magazines or newspapers. That meaning that it can be a regular daily, weekly or month publication of even a longer period depending on the type of information it contains. This is to say that the content are consolidated over a period of time, complied and then released to the public. Today, that form of dissemination has changed. News over the internet and websites are instantaneously updated faster than the printer could print and the new digital medium is able to stream videos and audio. With this emergence of the digital publication, what is then, the future of traditional publications?

As Day noted (2005) in his article that readers are concurrently reading websites online as well as publications, it is noteworthy to know that the present trend is the co-existence of both mediums. Examples of such are the Straits Times daily newspaper and the Straits Times Online; Discovery Channel Magazine and the Discovery website and PlayWorks with PlayWorks Online. I took the opportunity to leisurely read through the March 2009 issue of the Discovery Channel Magazine and by the time I finished it I had gone through most of the articles within and am impressed by the content and photos. I realized that through the systematic page by page reading, my concentration span on the magazine rate far better that reading those articles online – accounting to surfing with multiple windows of other stuffs opened at the same time, spreading attention over several things. Websites also suffered from occasional poor loading or missing data links with dampens the over experience.

This instance of experiment shows that the magazine holds a better spell on the reader which in this case is me. Self-navigation through the website and an overwhelming choice of information may in the end constitute a weak attention spread over all of them, where the mouse clicks faster than the eyes could read.

It is still too early to be sure that digital media will kill off the traditional media, but as of present, publications will still be around yet.

Reference

Day, M 2005, 'Web users aren't about to forsake the printed page' The Australian, April 14, p.22

Image source : Discovery Channel Magazine