The Columbia Journalism Review cited research by assistant professor Robert Magee in an article on how print and digital media can have different effects.
The authors expressed concern that these differences might influence readers’ tendency to empathize with characters in journalistic stories.
Magee’s experiment showed that readers of print material, compared with readers of online material, are likely to browse a greater number of stories, and they have better memory of what they have read.
This finding, along with others, led the authors to wonder if print stories might lead readers to become more engrossed in the narrative and more likely to empathize with a story’s characters. If so, then, stories in print might have a greater influence than those in digital media.
While the advantages of digital media have been touted often, the benefits of print media should not be overlooked, either.
