Print Media to Digital Media: An Important Transition

The media, one of the oldest and best resources for transferring information across people, places, situations, and every other aspect. Media is always transforming, it has always been developing through ages and by the time it will always take one step ahead in its progress. Although it has been a gradual change, it has made all the difference in communication throughout. In a broader purpose, media is mainly of two types, print media, and digital media. 

The Story of Print Media

Print media is the most traditional type of mass media. It is mainly published on paper and it is a hard copy arrangement. The concept of print media doesn’t only consist of published copies. It also regards the context of organizational shaping of the routines of journalistic reviews and also the norms behind the printed words. This type of media ought to represent the oldest and the most widely spread type of mass media. The resources include newspapers, magazines, journals, and other printed material. 

Newspapers basically have an association with the knowledge and information about current events and the main emphasis relies on political events. They are so much valuable and stand as a backbone for the democratic public circle as they try enabling the voice of the crowd. News magazines can also serve for the purpose of information function, while other magazines stick more to entertainment and fun. These magazines can show a wide variety ranging from food to clothes to lifestyle to special interest magazines. The printing media is utterly responsible for reporting the latest events and accurately pointed news and information. 

The Functions of Print Media

1. Education

Textbooks are a type of print media that is basically transmitted to pass over the information to all students. Print media helps the intellectual and professional people in the transmission of their knowledge and experience what they read. Also, government and education authorities have also started some magazines and newspapers, especially for students, like the N.I.E. newspaper. 

Through these newspapers, various tuition and educational institutions blow out their advertisements so that they acknowledge themselves in the student crowd. Besides this, they can control the format and budget of the advertisement at their will, like changing the size, space, color, and words. 

2. Business

Newspapers also contain sections that include business. In this section, the newspaper basically prints about the current successes and changes about different businesses, share markets, the complexity of demand and supply, the discounts, sales to give readers an insight of what all is going around. The section also contains the application regarding jobs, job specifications, job descriptions for the job applicants. This section also has the advertisements of restaurants and food stores helping tourists to find better restaurants, delicious foods at a particular place easily. 

Some magazines also include entrepreneurship sections, national and international business markets. Print media helps a lot to transmit important updated and useful information to readers.

3. Entertainment

Every newspaper and magazine always contains an entertainment section for readers for some leisure time. The entertainment section shows the time table of all the different programs that are to be broadcasted on different channels. Also, summaries or some programs are also reviewed in this section and readers can choose for themselves the movie they want to pick out. It also includes articles and a fun section for children. There are various riddles, puzzles, jokes, descriptions of various animal species, and many other things.

Read more: The extinction of newspapers 

Rise of Digital Media

The type of media that can be encoded in some machine-readable formatting is known as digital media. The specialty of this media is that it could be created, modified whenever required, distributed, viewed, and also can be preserved and sustained in all the digital electronic devices and even on digital social media. Digitalization can be understood as any data represented in forms of pictorial representation which eventually are easier to be interpreted and conveyed.

Now, understanding the word “digital media” altogether could lead to various explanations, so let’s understand the concept in parts. The word, ‘digital’ means any data representation in form of the series of digits, and ‘media’ could be referred to as a way or method or the phenomenon of broadcasting or conveying the communicable information. Henceforth, digital media is basically referred to as any information that can be conveyed through broadcasting on some screen. 

It can include text, audio, video, and graphics that are to be transmitted over the internet for viewing over the internet or any digital electronic systems.   

The Functions of Digital Media

1. Education

Through digital media, people can easily be contacted. Students and teachers can interact through the internet, children can also contact their friends. It helps to solve problems, getting information, sharing solutions among people over various places and platforms. For example, college students can get information regarding their projects by doing a small research on the internet. 

Besides that, there’s always a chance of learning, and so we can upgrade our knowledge anytime through it and digital platforms. In addition, there are a lot more. Online Learning Programs going on these days during this pandemic span of time. Everything during this time has been digitized, and so is the education aspects. Online classes are going for every academic as well as higher study courses. E-learning has been a great deal of comfort for students and teachers. 

What the advantage of e-learning is that the students can study anywhere they could have access to the internet or even can download the stuff beforehand to study offline elsewhere. It is also helping universities and tuition centers to promote their respective courses and facilities. Digitalization also helps the education industry to reduce the costs spent in marketing through pamphlets or posters.

 

2. Business

Nowadays, many people are going toward online businesses. An online startup means to start some sort of business online on some digital platforms and get to earn profit through it. The people who are related to online businesses need to be very creative with the ideas to run the website online. The website should be nicely aligned and must include all the required information.

These days business on Instagram and Facebook has taken a quite big step of growth. It has also shown many positive signs of relevance and reliability. Also, online shopping sites are available in plenty of forms, shopping from markets has been a bit reduced after the launching of digital shopping. It’s easy to shop online during this pandemic at our respective places without getting involved in the crowd. It saves time as well. 

Entrepreneurs of digital businesses can record short videos, or pictures to attract customers. Once the customer buys the product, they just have to do the payment and their work is complete and everything else is then the responsibility of that particular platform for delivery, refunds, and other associated stuff. Businessmen can also connect through video conferencing for meetings and discussions. Digital media helps them to connect even over the seas without traveling.

3. Entertainment

Playing online games is becoming the habit of the most percentage of young ones and teenagers. The internet has many online games, songs, movies for entertainment purposes. People can watch them online as well as they can download also on their respective devices.

The latest news of different artists is also uploaded from time to time on internet news sites. Fans can reach out to their favorite celebrities, artists, politicians through digital platforms. It becomes easier for the public also to see and be updated on everyone they like and also communicate to them under certain circumstances.

For entertainment, youtube, Amazon Prime Video, Netflix, Instagram, Facebook, and the counting goes on with numerous names. Entertainment through digital platforms is a blessing these days and has become a habit of most people. These platforms are way much preferable than to watch movies on television or listen to songs on the radio.

 

Conclusion

Media is the most significant way for the transmission and communication of news and information. Print media is a classic way through newspapers and magazines. But for reading that, one also needs to be literate and educated then only print media helps.

Print media can’t be useful in many parts in India because of its not so well literacy rate and here come digital media which overcomes this issue. For listening and watching, even an illiterate population could be involved in the updates in the current events around the world as well as for their own entertainment. During this time, where technology is developing on a daily basis, we not only collect data or information from the internet but also scroll through it for shopping and entertainment. 

Digital media has been providing so many relevant advantages to numerous industries. As for a comparison, print media can be better with education including book studies and study from the hard copies. On the other hand, digital media suits best for business and entertainment and also gives every single person the opportunity to be a part of all the things around unbiased literacy.

Read more: How mass media helped society 

Written By - Pavas Shrigyan

Edited By -  Neha Kundu