Old media, or legacy media, are the mass media institutions that dominated prior to the Information Age; particularly print media, film studios, music studios, advertising agencies, radio broadcasting, and television.
Old media institutions are centralized and communicate with one-way technologies to a generally anonymous mass audience. By definition, it is often dichotomized with New media, more often computer technologies that are interactive and comparatively decentralized; they enable people to telecommunicate with one another, due to their mass use and availability, namely through internet.
Old Media companies have diminished in the last decade with the changing media landscape, namely the modern reliance on streaming and digitization of what was once analog, and the advent of simple worldwide connection and mass conversation. Old media, or "legacy media" conglomerates include Disney, Warner Media, ViacomCBS, Bertelsmann Publishers, and NewsCorp., owners of Fox news and entertainment, and span from books to audio to visual media. These conglomerates are often owned and inherited between families, such as the Murdochs of NewsCorp. Due to traditional media's heavy use in economics and political structures, it remains current regardless of New Media's emergence.
The advent of new communication technology (NCT) has brought forth a set of opportunities and challenges for conventional media. The presence of new media and the Internet in particular, has posed a challenge to conventional media, especially the printed newspaper. The new media have also affected the way newspapers get and circulate their news. Since 1999, almost 90% of daily newspapers in the United States have been actively using online technologies to search for articles and most of them also create their own news websites to reach new markets.
The challenges faced by old media, especially newspapers, has to do with the combination of the global economic crisis, dwindling readership and advertising dollars, and the inability of newspapers to monetize their online efforts.