The Similarities or Differences Between Online and Printed Mass Media.

Nowadays many Indonesian people, especially teenagers or college students, who use the internet as a medium to meet their information needs. It happened because the trend of smart phones and gadgets are already widespread in Indonesian society audiences. Although, basically both print and online mass media have the same goal, namely to provide information, but there are some differences that can be the hallmark of each of the mass media.

The first difference, online media can only be accessed through the Internet, so that the online media is not very familiar to the lower middle income people. While the print media such as newspapers, was better known by the people of Indonesia because it has existed since colonial times. From the technical point of view and style of writing there are also differences, the online media there is no length restriction in the writing of the manuscript as a web page can hold any text throughout. For the length print manuscript has been restricted, e.g. 5-7 pages. In the script element procedures, online media generally allows journalists to directly upload his writings, in contrast to the print media must be in the ACC by the editors before being loaded.

The next difference in terms of editing, online media is more favored because if there is an error in the news writing, the author can immediately fix writings. While the print media in the event of an error in writing and are now in press or published, then writing it could not be repaired anymore. In the published schedule, the print media must be in production on a regular basis (daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly), in contrast to the print media that can be issued at any time, except for the specific rubrics. And the latter in terms of distribution, despite the printed media cannot be directly read by the general public before through the distribution process, while the online media as a news or writings have been uploaded to the website, all the people around the world who has access to the internet directly read.

From the above, you can clearly see that most of the differences in print journalism to online media only on technical issues.

In terms of nature, there is a similarity between online media to electronic media such as radio and television. They are always required to present the message of the most up to date as quickly as possible. They also usually do not have to wait until all the data is collected. So there is no data, though only slightly, they immediately report it. If there are new developments regarding the incident, they report it again. And so on. Therefore, the rules of writing in the online media tend to be free, do not get too hung up on the rules of language and journalism generally accepted.