Can mobile media kill newspapers and TV?

WASHINGTON, USA: Smart phones aren't taking people away from traditional media sources like newspapers or television. Instead, mobile media are filling the spaces in people's daily routine in which other sources are either unavailable or inconvenient to use.

That suggests mobile media use is taking a different path to popularity than did technologies like TV, said John Dimmick, who led the study as professor of communication at Ohio State University, the journal New Media and Society reports.

"Typically, what happens with new media is that they compete with and displace older media to a certain extent, like television did with radio," Dimmick said.

"But at least early in its development, mobile media isn't taking us away from older media - it has its own separate niche," he said, according to an Ohio statement.

Dimmick conducted the study with Gregory Hoplamazian, graduate student at Ohio State and John Christian Feaster of Rowan University, New Jersey.

Dimmick noted that the data in this study was collected in 2007, the year when the first Apple iPhone was released.

The success of the iPhone may mean that mobile media has started to make inroads into the use of other media technologies, Dimmick said, but we won't know for sure until new studies are completed. This study involved 166 participants aged between 19 and 68 years.