PRINT VS WEB

AN D BOTH MEDIA ARE GROWING

The Internet is reckless, it exhilarates and grabs you. While magazines are immersive, they consume you.“ ”

Print also has a great pass-along audience. If you’ve ever read a magazine in a dentist’s office while waiting to have your teeth cleaned, then you knowwhat we’re talking about.Since it isn’t a medium regulated by every second of information, it isn’t really affected by immediacy and also promotes deeper connections. There is also a greater credibility that comes with printed media, the faith that the information has been validated before it reaches you. To keep up, print is becoming increasingly eco conscious as well. Paper companies have product lines focused solely on the use of environmentally sustainable processes and materials to meet their customers’ needs. Printers have committed to not just recycled but also to sustainable business practices.

When it comes to reading magazines, our personal opinion is that print is not dead, and will continue to last. There is something special about holding a paper product in your hands that you can flip through, dog-ear ages in, and tear out columns to save or pass along. Agreed, that we are in an electronic age and having the ability to electronically archive, search through, forward, and repurpose content is integral to being efficient in our busy lives. Still ,There is a dedicated, methodic, and engaged audience on the other end of that print product. They are taking their time, absorbing each page, flipping back to what they liked. For the older genera-tion, Nothing’s taking them away from their books or their newspapers.

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OLD is

GOLD?

While forecasts indicate a shining future for the web, print’s death might have been greatly exaggerated. You can’t beat the portability and pleasingly tactile nature of paper. After a day of staring at backlit computer screens our heads ache and our eyeballs plead for the subtlety of sunlight. After all print has been a vehicle through his-tory, after stories were narrated, they were written. When events could not be photographed, they were described in paper & ink. Magazines effectively cater to a variety of consumer interests. It builds an audience and satisfies them. A tangible piece of information or evenentertainment, a magazine may be around long after the launch date of the issue, which means advertisers, can continue to increase their reach , long after a campaign has ended.

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A new medium doesn’t necessarily displace an existing one. Just as movies didn’t kill the radio. Just as TV didn’t kill the movies. An established medium can continue to flourish so long as it continues to offer a unique experience, exactly why people aren’t giving up swimming, just because they also enjoy surfing. Are you a Kindle totter or a book enthusiast? Do you love reading the daily news on your I Pad or do you have it delivered daily to your home? These emergences in lifestyle are posing strikingly significant questions to an industry that we’re exposed to 24*7. Mass communication bombards readers on a daily basis in the form of both print and electronic media, and the topic of ‘print versus digital’ is one with many angles to it and one that could easily get heated , depending on who you are talking to.

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The electronic media came with the advent of Radio that was popularduring the first half of the 20th century and then by Television. Currently for more than a decade the cable television has captured everyone’s view. We now get to see more than 50 channels onTV, with channels ranging from news, sports, music, family, cartoons and etc. With everything at our fingertip with remote controlled TVs and their prices coming down in the market, we choose this over print media or that is howit is supposed to be. Many magazines and newspapers are now feeling the increasing pressure and competition of the Web. It’s thrilling accessibility andfast pace has made it super striking.

No longer are we limited to people in close physical proximity.

Major consumer brands have reallocated their advertising dollars to the Web to reach online visitors.It allows for great flexibility, whetherits adding a page to your website, or correcting a spelling mistake. These changes are hardly a trouble. EvenFor investors and advertisers, the timeand money that it takes to design for print, plus the cost of ad space,

is exponentially higher than it is to design. Also, complying with our current Web standards, we don’t leave behind any potential customers. It also enables tailor made advertising, targeting audiences in accordance to their needs. Very importantly, unlike print or even broadcast, the Web requires user participation there by making it an active medium. We have witnessed the same in various scenarios.

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THE MOTTO BEING :

COMMUNICATION-ANYONE, ANYWHERE, ANYTIME.

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Digital media, is a dynamic two-way medium that permits dialogue between you and your customer. Whether it is through an email or through a social media campaign, your customer is not just a passive recipient of your messages, but rather an active participant in the communication process; themost effective form of marketing is by word of mouth. One click on the Web allows the user to share their personal experiences with brands, products, and services with anyone around the world. Ultimately also granting theopportunity to provide feedback which, in turn, allows brands to improve their customer service. Be it twitter orfacebook, orkut, google plus -all these

The keystone of integratedmarketing communications - the more a user engages in a two-way conversations with a brand, the more likely a long-lasting relationship will form. For offline brands, online presence is a neat way of gaining extra marketing attention and boosting their community, even if there’s no money in it. There was a time when the ‘Mad men’ of the world controlled what brands we were exposed to and even how much information we could obtain on a brand. Not anymore. Today, we as consumers control what we want to be exposed to and what information we want to share. And many times, we can even customize the online experience to our personal preferences. Internet being a transactional medium, it’s easier for marketers to track metrics, including how many users visited the site, how long they remained on the site, what they clicked on or purchased, etc. Digital media campaigns allow you to monitor the exact open and click-through rates.

networking sites are an open platform to get in depth insights about what is happening in another person’s life, this has enabled an extremely activeconnectivity without actual physical presence. For the current generation, which saturates with information with remarkable rapidity, this seems likea rather perfect feeder. Along side all these advantages, as some people in angst said “digital media doesn’t grow on trees” For an evolving eco-conscious world, the Web can reach millions of users with one distribution point, all while saving energy as well asraw materials.

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When it comes to reading magazines, our personal opinion is that print isnot dead, and will continue to last. There is something special about holding a paper product in your hands that you can flip through, dog-ear pages in, and tear out columns to save or pass along. Agreed, that we are in an electronicage and having the ability to electronically archive, search through, forward, and repurpose content is integral to being efficient in our busy lives. That however does not affect the essence of print media.There is a dedicated, methodic, and engaged audience on the other end of that print product. They are taking their time, absorbing each page, flipping back to what they liked. For the older generations, this isn’t even a question. Nothing’s taking them away fromtheir books and newspapers. For them, the web and print are two totally different mediums , and have their own purposes. The person reading print has the time to read an in-depth article, to study graphs, to spend time on a word-heavy ad. Our observation is that we have entered the era of new media, which is here to stay. Rather than web obsolescing print, both will work together to cater the optimum. Various newspapers and publictions see the value in utilizing the Web and mobile phones as both distribution points and marketing vehicles, and have transitioned their print publications to digital content. Marketers have been experimenting with Quick Response codes in their marketing of print materials. This combines the best of print, mobile, and Web platforms. A marketer benefits from the shelf lifeand reach of a print ad, the portability of a mobile phone, and the flexibility and active engagement of the Web. It falls on the publisher’s shoulders to reconcile the two formats and present them in a way that won’t sabotage all their hard work. New media is exploding all over the place, and just as major studio execs have no idea how to handle the boom of webisodes and online films, book publishers still haven’tfigured out what to do with eBooks. Do they charge the same price as the

printed version? Do they slash the price for digital and try to recoup the cost elsewhere? Self-publishers are bypassing the need for big publishing houses by going straight to digital format, which eliminates the need to sink the majority of their sales earnings into paying the printing costs and gives them a much larger share of the book’s profit. The solution to having both digital and print living in harmony is to tie them together asone. Buy a book or comic; get a code for the digital copy free of charge! It’s a solution that will ensure that the bigger companies continue to publish printed material for those who don’t like their books running out of batteries and allows people who do like e-books to their physical collection anywhere their reader can go. And for the smaller com-panies who can only afford to go digital, they won’t have to worry about it one bit. Sales of print copies goes back up, independent publishers can still sell to their audience without breaking the bank, and consumers get the best of both worlds. We absolutely need both. So let’s have faith that till we settle on a preference, the online and offline industries would’ve successfully tied themselvesto both become indispensible andmutually favorable.

www.openforum.com/articles www.comicbooked.com www.printmediacentr.com www.powerofmagazines.com www.informationexperts.com

Digital books aren’t going away. But their rise doesn’tneed to mean the death of print.

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Compiled by : SHAIVALINI KUMAR