Within traditional media (print and broadcast), print media displays the greatest diversity of all, in both ownership and content. Print media ranges from daily to weekly newspapers, from news magazines to a range of special interest publications. Print media also includes one-off publications such as fliers and leaflets. Out of all of the mass media formats, print media is also the oldest, as written text on stone, cloth or paper.
In today’s world print has a smaller audience than other forms of mass media. This is due in part to literacy levels, access, and wealth. Simple personal preference is also a factor. For example, in China – where earliest known print media originated – one calculation in 2009 determined that 81.5% of the population was literate. Total circulations of daily and non-daily print publications were 202 per 1000 citizens, roughly 20%, while radio and television sets hovered around 32 and 31% respectively.[i] Another calculation placed the number of radios and televisions sets as more than double the number of daily and non daily-circulations.[ii] What calculations like these do not account for of course is the number of people who will read one print publication, or the number of people who will listen to one radio set or watch one television set. However, it is clear from the various angles of statistics around the world, one can safely assume that more people listen to the radio or watch television than do those who read a publication.
This does not make print media any less valuable nor less necessary to the overall pluralism of the media landscape however. Print media has a history of being privately owned rather than government or state owned, but both kinds of ownership have a record of complaints regarding biases. If public press have the risk of being manipulated to benefit the government [iii], private press have the risk of introducing biases in order to meet the private interests -economic, political, ideological...- of its owners[iv].
Furthermore, print media in a sense has more longevity, as it is exists for longer periods of time; however, the new information technologies put this into question, as the internet is accumulating old news since its initial spread. It has been detected that greater media exposure improves the degree of learning, without affecting the levels of news forgetting [v]. Agenda-setting theory has largely documented a link between the media agenda and the public agenda, related to people's primary concerns [vi]. However the link between media agenda and political agenda -those issues which are considered as priorities by politicians- has not yet been consistently shown [vii]. In addition, a number of studies have shown that in many contexts, even if readership is less than television viewership, newspapers set the agenda in terms of topics and debates for other media – and for politicians. This may be due to the fact that print media can often afford for more in-depth stories. It may also be a result of print media’s more ‘serious’ profile than other forms of media, habits of politicians in terms of media use, and assumptions by politicians about the power of newspapers [viii]. While this influence may be changing with the new media revolution, it probably still remains true to an extent.
[v] Meeter, M; Murre, J; Janssen, S. 2005. ‘Remembering the news: Modeling retention data from a study with 14,000 participants’. Memory & Cognition. 33(5), pp: 793-810.
[vi] McCombs, M; Shaw, D. 1972. ‘The agenda-setting function of mass media’. Public Opinion Quarterly 36(2), pp: 176-187.
[vii] Walgrave, S; Van Aelst, P. 2006. ‘The contingency of the mass media’s political agenda setting power: Toward a preliminary theory’. Journal of Communication, 56, pp: 88-109
[viii]“Newspapers, at least in Belgium in the 1990s, appear to have a larger political agenda-setting effect than TV news. This need not indicate that television does not matter, of course. But our results suggest the importance of newspaper content in the empirical study of agenda setting by mass media. Now, Belgium is not a “TV-centric” country, like the United States, for example, and newspapers are an important forum for public and political debate. In countries such as the United States, we might find stronger TV effects. We nevertheless suspect that newspapers have some intrinsic qualities that make them prone to setting the political agenda in any post- industrial democracy.” As found in: Stefaan Walgrave, Stuart Soroka and Michiel Nuytemans “The Mass Media's Political Agenda-Setting Power: A Longitudinal Analysis of Media, Parliament, and Government in Belgium (1993 to 2000)”,
Comparative Political Studies 41
(2008): 814, originally published online September 17, 2007, http://www.m2p.be/index.php?page=publications&id=56
