Online Vs. Print Media

Technology has been chasing up so quickly where instead of reading news in the newspaper, you can even read it online by just going to the website. Like for example, whenever you are already leaving in oversea but you still do want to update yourself with Malaysia current news by reading it at The Star Online. Now in the current environment there is wireless connection and even mobiles having to read their news from compared to the traditional printed version. However, the printed documents are documents which forces audience to read from left to right or even top to bottom (Kress & Van Leeuwen, 2006).




For me, I would run through the newspapers (printed form) just to know what happening information for the day is. Penman (1998) calls this kind of individuals as ‘flippers’. Flippers are readers which are most likely stop to read when something catches their attention. for example of a print is shown below.





Virtual newspaper readers allow to scan through the documents simpler (Nielsen 1997). Furthermore, by using the virtual newspaper, it allows quicker, simpler, concise and has the highlighted keywords and hyperlinks for further understanding (Nielsen, 1997). But as my opinion, normally people would prefer printed newspaper rather than virtual ones because of staring so much on the computer, the screen is too glaring. However, this is an example of a virtual news paper is shown below from The Star Online.




Reference

Kress, G. & van Leeuwen, T. 2006. Reading images. Chapter 1:
The semiotic landscape: language and visual communication.

Nielsen, J, 1997. How Users Read on the Web, viewed 5th May 2008 at http://www.useit.com/alertbox/9710a.html


Penman R 1998, " Document structures and reader's habits', Communication news, vol. 11.