Traditional VS New Media: An examination of news consumption patterns amongst media users
Reed College of Media, West Virginia University, Morgantown, WV, USA.
Review Article
World Journal of Advanced Research and Reviews, 2023, 18(03), 1658-1663
Article DOI: 10.30574/wjarr.2023.18.3.0972
Publication history:
Received on 29 April 2023; revised on 08 June 2023; accepted on 12 June 2023
Abstract:
The Fourth Industrial Revolution has continued to increasingly fade the lines between the physical and technological worlds and has led to the growth of the new media over the years. The emergence of the new media to co-exist side by side with the traditional media has thrown up action points for research into the high-choice media environment the world is currently experiencing. Before the internet revolution, individuals relied heavily on the traditional media for news contents on politics, societal happenings and the state of affairs around them. This study sought to understand the patterns of news consumption in a high-choice media landscape, where people can choose to flip between options and preferences. The study’s theoretical foundation is built on the postulations of Katz and Blumler’s Uses and Gratification Theory, which argues that media users have needs that drive their media choices and how they consume media contents. Findings from the study reveal that the contemporary media environment has led us into the age of news repertoire, where news consumption is not monolithic, but instead, it is a combination of patterns. The study also finds that in the consumption of news in contemporary times, the traditional media seems to have slowed down, as individuals continue to indulge more in the new media. It concludes that the traditional media has not gone out of relevance, as it still supplies credible and reliable news. This heterogenous consumption pattern of news is called news repertoire. This defines the age we live in.
Keywords:
Traditional Media; News; Uses and gratification; New Media
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Copyright © 2023 Author(s) retain the copyright of this article. This article is published under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Liscense 4.0