new media old media, competition & complementarity:
Does Internet use displace traditional forms of media consumption?Although we might not like our inky newsprint, digital news is gaining in popularity. In December online newspaper readership increased between 12% (according to Nieman Journalism Lab) and 16% (according to cnet), with 9 of the top 10 newspaper websites having a better year in 2008 than in 2007, as measured by Nielsen Online Media Research.
And we are consuming more TV than ever. Online TV program viewership is sharply increasing. Randal Stross at The New York Times suggests that the cultural appetite for television has been influenced and encouraged by the rise of You Tube, where in December, almost 100 million viewers in the United States watched 5.9 billion videos (according to comScore). What’s interesting according to Stross, is that Internet video consumption is not “cannibalizing” TV viewship–instead there is a complimentarity among visual technologies in our three screen culture.
