What Are the Advantages of Electronic Media?
Electronic media offers a number of advantages over print media, including immediacy and a richer experience for the consumer. When a story breaks, electronic media can report on it quickly, even instantaneously when social media is part of the picture. Printed media relies on daily print runs, necessitating a certain amount of lag time before news is reported. Online and electronic media can also provide moving pictures and sound.
Social media has become one of the front-line methods for reporting and transmitting information. A number of news stories, such as the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, MO., originally broke on the Internet when witnesses used Twitter or Skype to describe what they were seeing. This reporting even beat television news to the punch, with Internet broadcasters covering the events of the ensuing riots through Youtube and other streaming services live as events happened.
Electronic media, especially on the Internet, is also empowering more people to report on events in their communities. The ease with which a person can record and broadcast their words makes it easy for citizen journalists to report on their own stories rather than relying on established mechanisms. More and more consumers are turning to these sources to get their news, and print journalism is suffering greatly from the shift. Many magazines and newspapers have turned to creating online editions in an attempt to recover advertising revenue.
