The complementary relationship between the Internet and traditional mass media: the case of online news and information

Introduction: “Death of old media in the face of new communication technologies” is a issue which has received intensive attention in both academic and industrial research. Many researches are conducted on this issue in past decade. But the question whether old media are driven out of existence by new media, has received no definitive answer. I want to disscuss about one of researches on this field and title of the selected research is “The complementary relationship between the Internet and traditional mass media:the case of online news and information”. This research conducted by AnNguyen and Mark Western from The University of Queensland, Australia.
Medium-centred and user-centred perspectives: Since the first empirical attempts to explore the potential effect of new media on old media in the 1940s, there have been two main approaches to the issue: one is centered on the medium and its attributes and supports a displacement and replacement (absolute displacement) hypothesis; the other is focused on users' needs and often results in proposing a complementary effect of the new on the old.
The most pronounced medium-centred approach so far is Maxwell McCombs' Principle of Relative Constancy. This principle was inspired by media owner Charles Scripps, who contended that mass communication products have become staples of consumption in our society (much like food, clothing and shelter) and thus, 'in spite of the increasing complexity of mass communications with the advent of new media, the pattern of economic support has been relatively constant and more closely related to the general economy than to the various changes and trends taking place within the mass media field itself. In other words, as staples, mass communication receives a constant share of the economic pie, or a relatively fixed proportion of all expenditures. Using aggregate data of consumers' and advertisers' spending on mass communication in the USA from 1929 through 1968, McCombs found strong support for this hypothesis: despite some short-term anomalies, the ratio of media spending to total consumer spending remained relatively fixed (around 3%) during the four decades. This media-spending share constancy hypothesis, which was so compelling that McCombs raised it to the status of a principle, was confirmed in a follow-up study for the 1968-1977 decade. During the 1948-1959 period, when television rapidly entered American households, McCombs tested these three possible sources to determine which accounted for television revenue. He discovered that the Principle of Relative Constancy also held for this shorter period of television penetration, which means television did not bring about any significant increase in total media spending (that is, it did not divert from non-media spending).
the constancy concept developed by McCombs is potentially unreliable because of its many theoretical and methodological drawbacks. Extending McCombs's data to 1981, Wood revisited his methodological approach to discover that the Principle of Relative Constancy's inherent hypothesis of income-share constancy in mass media spending, although correct for the whole six-decade period, was not supported in short-run tests. In particular, mass media spending significantly fluctuated from one decade to another and decade-long increases in disposable income were associated with either drop or surge in media spending. Such short-run departures from constancy were found in later studies showing that mass media spending dramatically increased after the VCR penetrated daily life. Son and McCombs found that total mass media spending was up to 3.7% in 1987 from 2.2% in 1975 although they argued that this was a short-term exception rather than something to discredit the long-term Principle of Relative Constancy.
Recent research has also called the constancy assumption into question in the light of demand theory. Noh and Grant found the constancy assumption a biased adoption of consumer demand theory since it only takes income into account and leaves aside other possible explanations. For example, even if income remains constant, consumer spending on mass media will change as the result of a change in the price of a media good. Similarly, Dupagne asserted that the proportional relationship in the Principle of Relative Constancy is inconsistent with the dominant, traditional, micro-economic model of consumer choice and that using different methodological factors might result in conflicting evidence about the Principle of Relative Constancy. Using empirical evidence from Belgium, the study explored five independent variables (income, price, population, unemployment and interest rate) to find that price and population were better predictors of consumer spending on mass media than income.
In a broader context, one could argue that different media as different content (information and/or entertainment) resources will coexist for a number of reasons.
Hypothesises
H1: Internet users use traditional news and information sources more frequently than non-users of the Internet.
H2: Internet news and information users use traditional sources more frequently than non-users of Internet news and information.
H3: Frequent Internet news and information users use traditional sources more frequently than non-frequent users of Internet news and information.
H4: Internet news and information usage is more associated with news and information seeking from more information-intensive sources.
Methodology
This study is based on a secondary data analysis of the 2003 Australian Survey of Social Attitudes, a national social-attitudes survey conducted from August to December 2003, using a stratified, systematic, random sample from the 2002 Australian Electoral Roll. The overall response rate was 44% with a final sample size of 4270.
Result
H1 was not supported but another three was confirmed.
APPLICATIONS FOR IRAN:
We can apply above method in Iranian media. We can explore the effect of internet on Iranian tv which is governmental. At the same time we can try give a answer to a follow-up question: What media is first choich of Iranian people. Before first choice of Iranian was Tv. But Now I think it is changed.