Traditional Media Should Follow Digital Media or Die?

Siyue Wang

Ellen Gilmour

ESL408 9.00 a.m. section

Apr.26, 2015

Research Paper

Traditional Media Should Follow Digital Media or Die

Media are the means of communication that widely affects people, such as radio, television, newspapers and magazines (“media.” Dictionary.com). In terms of the purpose of media, it can be divided into two categories – traditional media and digital media. Traditional media conveys what we heard onto television, print, radio and mail, while digital media is the term used to describe the new century combined with communication technologies, such as Internet, blogs and videos, and also with some social APP like Facebook and Twitter (Michelaq, principles). They both have significance in our lives. As an example, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer exists in an online-only form by scrapping its print edition, which is regarded as an experiment to create a core of website form. However, this “online-only” strategy did not generate profit to the company, instead it results in the loss of readers because people will not spend 45 minutes on a website (Folkenflik, David, 2009). So, traditional media should not die although digital media almost cover our lives.

First, traditional media is more informative to people. Even though digital media is the primary resource that people acquire news, especially young adults. Traditional media dominates digital media in information informative. According to an online survey based on the readers of Elite Daily, obviously, young adults acquire a majority of news from new media. However, when the survey ask about how informative the traditional media and digital media are, only four out of every ten believe online news is more informative. This means that more than half of young adults believe traditional media still is the one that conducts “more informative” news to people.

Fig.1. Online survey about primary news source comes from

Source: University of Florida College News,...