Print Media And The Challenges Of Social Media

This paper examines the print media and the challenges posed by the social media. It is no doubt that the social media has altered the news gathering and processing paradigm but the print medium remain relevant in news dissemination. The study is anchored on technology determinism theory by Marshall McLuhan. The theory states that media technologies shape how we as individuals in a society think feel act and how a society operates as we move from one technology age to another. In another way McLuhan predicted that we would be in the midst of a revolution and that the world will never be the same due to the advance in technology. Scholarly journals and conference papers formed the sources for secondary data for this study. Findings from the study reveal that the new media have caused the print media particularly the newspaper a huge lost in revenue and advertisement. The study also discovered that the social media have altered the traditional gatekeeping theory of the print media hence it is common to find all sort of information on social media platforms. The study also reveals that media technology has aided the media audience to become more sophisticated thereby being able to manipulate the new media in effect creating audiences that have contributed in reshaping the information gathering and dissemination process on the social media. Furthermore the paper succinctly reveals an emerging paradigm in media convergence it discovered that the new media converge on the traditional media. As a result the new media also need the traditional media to survive. The implication of this study is therefore with the continuous development in technology it becomes safe to argue that no mass medium will totally triumph over the other.