The oldest media forms are newspapers, magazines, journals, newsletters, and other printed material. These publications are collectively known as the print media. The print media is responsible for more reporting than other news sources. Many news reports on television, for example, are merely follow-up stories about news that first appeared in newspapers.
Broadcast media are news reports broadcast via radio and television. The other type of broadcast media is radio. Many people still listen to radio news every day, especially during morning and evening commutes. Local news stations have a particularly large audience because they can report on local weather, traffic, and events.
New media refers to “those digital media that are interactive, incorporate two-way communication and involve some form of computing,” Robert Logan writes in his book Understanding New Media. New media is “very easily processed, stored, transformed, retrieved, hyperlinked and, perhaps most radical of all, easily searched for and accessed.”
A distinction between new media and old media is that old media is for the most part mass media. In addition, each form of new media is highly interactive, while mass media is not. Users of new media are active producers of content and information, whether sending an email or using Internet collaboration tools.
