Old media

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Old media, or legacy media,^[1] are the mass media institutions that dominated prior to the Information Age; particularly print media, film studios, music studios, advertising agencies, radio broadcasting, and television.^[2][3][4]

Old media is also called traditional media

Old media institutions are centralized and communicate with one-way technologies to a generally anonymous mass audience.^[4][5] By definition, it is often contrasted with new media, which are typically computer or smartphone-based media that are interactive and comparatively decentralized, enabling people to telecommunicate with one another peer-to-peer or through social media platforms,^[6] with mass use and availability through the Internet.^[7]

Differences:

1. Cost-effectiveness: Digital media is cheaper^[9]
2. Interactivity and engagement: Digital media allows for more interaction between users^[10]
3. Data accuracy: Digital media has more accurate data^[11]
4. Consumer trust: A popular cite, it is easy to find out how the product is and read reviews before pruchasing or trusting, resulting in increased user trust.^[12]
5. Reach: Traditional media has a wider reach with certain demographics, like the older generation. ^[13]
6. Feedback: Digital media allows for quick feedback with users^[14]

History of media can go as far back as the BC years with handwritten newspapers, but the invention of the printing press in 1440 was the start of the media as we define it today as “traditional media”. 1440-1990s is considered the span of time where traditional media evolved. After the year 2000 is when modern/new media came into play. The fast paced world and creation of the internet forever changed the world. ^[15]

1440- invention of the movable type printing press, by Gutenberg. This made mass production of print media possible, diminsihing the need for mouth to mouth story telling. Books were now copied exactly the same, deminishing hand written books that resulted in mistakes. ^[16]

1810- Friedrich Koenig, a German printer, was a big deal in making media production bigger, by hooking the steam engine up to a printing press. This resulted in the industrialization of printed media. ^[17]

1837-Samuel Morse patented the telegraph. This allowed people to no longer need to rely on messages by word of mouth^[18]

Early decades of the 20th century- Radio (first nonprint form of media) invented by Guglielmo Marconi, became very popular. Radios were less expensive than telephones and available by the 1920s, allowed the ability of huge numbers of people to listen to the same event at the same time. ^[19]

1920s- Radios started being sold^[20]

1924- Radio was a great resource for advertisers, who could now have access to a bigger audience. The early days of radio were considered a “a glorious opportunity for the advertising man to spread his sales propaganda” because of “a countless audience, sympathetic, pleasure seeking, enthusiastic, curious, interested, approachable in the privacy of their homes (Briggs & Burke, 2005).”^[21]

1927- First television invented by Philo Farnsworth.He was a US inventor who used a image dissector camera tube that transmitted its first image, which was a simple straight line.^[22]

1930s (The Great Depression)- consumer demand decreased dramatically, the need to increase production further worsened the economic crisis. this resulted in more goods being produced than that could be sold. ^[23]

1946 (post World War II)- The US was in good standing during this time, and the television took rise for many households. About 7000 TVs were in the US during this post war time. Within 7 years, two-thirds of American household had at least one TV in their home.^[24]

1950s & 1960s- "Broadcast television was the dominant form of mass media, and the three major networks controlled more than 90 percent of the news programs, live events, and sitcoms viewed by Americans" ^[25].gross national product (GNP) doubled; American homes were big contributers to the economy. Many households owned a television, car, and a house in the suburbs. ^[26]

Vietnam war- Televised news became popular during this war. It was the first war that was televised nationally as a conflict. Nightly images of war and protesters were shown on these news platforms. ^[27]

1975- three major TV networks accounted for 93 percent of all television viewing.^[28]

1980s and 1990s- spread of cable television

1. Tangibility: Traditional allows people to touch it, feel it, and even smell it.^[29]
2. Credibility: Traditional media is much more trustworthy than digital media. Digital media or new media, increased the spread of fake news, unlike traditional media.^[30]
3. Reach: Traditional media has a wide reach with the older generations.^[31]
4. Targeted audience: Traditional media can be targeted to specific audiences.^[32]

1. Cost: Traditional media is commonly pretty expensive to produce^[33]
2. Limited interactivity: Traditional media does not interaction, debate, or communication between others reading or seeing.^[34]
3. Little feedback: Traditional media does not have rapid feedback for consumers.^[35]

Old media companies have diminished in the last decade with the changing media landscape, namely the modern reliance on streaming and digitization of formerly analog content,^[36] and the advent of simple worldwide connection and mass conversation.^[7] Old media, or "legacy media" conglomerates include Disney, Warner Media, ViacomCBS, Bertelsmann Publishers, and NewsCorp., owners of Fox News and Entertainment, and span from books to audio to visual media.^[37] These conglomerates are often owned and inherited between families, such as the Murdochs of NewsCorp.^[38] Due to traditional media's heavy use in economics and political structures, it remains current regardless of new media's emergence.^[7]

The advent of new communication technology (NCT) has brought forth a set of opportunities and challenges for conventional media.^[39] The presence of new media, and the Internet in particular, has posed a challenge to conventional media, especially the printed newspaper.^[40] The new media have also affected the way newspapers get and circulate their news. Since 1999, almost 90% of daily newspapers in the United States have been actively using online technologies to search for articles and most of them also create their own news Web sites to reach new markets.^[40]

The challenges faced by old media, especially newspapers, has to do with the combination of the global economic crisis, dwindling readership and advertising funds, and the inability of newspapers to monetize their online efforts.^[41] Newspapers, especially in the West and the United States in particular, have lost many of their classified advertisements to the Internet. Additionally, a depressed economy forced more readers to cancel their newspaper subscriptions, and business firms to cut their advertising budgets as part of their overall cost-cutting measures. As a result, closures of newspapers, bankruptcy, job cuts and salary cuts are widespread.^[42]

This has made some representatives of the United States newspaper industry seek bailouts from the government by allowing U.S. newspapers to recoup taxes they paid on profits previously to help offset some of their current losses. Accusations are being made toward search engine giants by publishers such as Sir David Bell, who categorically accused Google and Yahoo! of "stealing" the contents of newspapers. A similar allegation came from media mogul Rupert Murdoch in early April 2009, questioning if Google "should ... steal all our copyrights."^[42] Likewise, Sam Zell, owner of the Tribune Company that publishes the Chicago Tribune, the Los Angeles Times, and the Baltimore Sun claimed it was the newspapers in America who allowed Google to steal their content, and therefore credited themselves for providing Google with their content.^[42]

Old media, opposed to its newer counterpart, have been found by theorists and historians like Chris Anderson (author of The Long Tail and The Long Tail Phenomenon of Mass Communication),^[37] Marshall McLuhan, Wolfgang Ernst, and Carolyn Marvin^[43] to be inaccurate to the realities of mass communication's progression. McLuhan, specifically, argues that a medium's information is contingent upon the very medium.^[43] In so doing, it never dies and always remains current. Therefore, the binary of old and new media, with new media making old become obsolete, is inaccurate. It would be far more accurate, according to the theoretical argument of authors like Ernst, to view new and old media as a spectrum.^[43] The challenges faced by old media, therefore, will never completely remove them from the public mass media sphere.

"Old media" as an idea only ever existed because "new media" does. In the research of Simone Natale, the use of the term "old media" in a survey of books only began to become popular in the late twentieth century once the developments of new media, such as the Internet, became widely available.^[43] Natale writes of old media as a social construct because of this; because no medium is old, one compares old to new in hindsight.

• Decline of newspapers
• History of telecommunication
• Mainstream media
• Media intelligence
• Residual media