(Person) Percentage - Sabanci University Research Database

The Asian Media & Mass Communication Conference 2010 Osaka, Japan
Introduction
This paper examines news workers’ everyday production practices in the press
industries in Taiwan to see how media convergence has transformed their everyday
work of making news. Convergence, in the media and journalistic field, is becoming a
global trend as lots of media companies continue to expand their holdings beyond
their original core products. Similarly, in Taiwan, news media from different fields,
particularly newspapers, have developed different levels of convergence with various
goals, from increasing profit, providing multimedia content and strategies for
maintaining their decreasing readership.
News organizations worldwide have developed their convergent polices with various
purposes. From the newsroom’s perspective, convergence in the digital platform
enables news workers to produce multimedia content and circulate it across media
(García Avilés & Carvajal, 2008). This provides a way for news media to attract a
younger audience. From a business viewpoint, convergence in some cases also forces
news workers to learn multi-skills and media organization to re-structure their
newsrooms located in different geographic places, which tends to be regarded as a
cost-saving strategy (Quinn, 2005). Scholars have used the term ‘convergent
journalism’ (Quinn & Filak, 2005) to emphasize the impact of convergence on
journalism.
Despite the fact that many scholars that have analyzed the influence of convergence to
the journalistic field from different angles, so far there are few studies focusing on
how media convergence in news industries are connected to news workers production
practices. One critical issue of this is how media convergence at different levels may
impact the news workers’ day to day production practices. Moreover, this is how
convergence links to news workers.
By focusing on the relationship of convergence and the everyday news production
practice of news workers, this paper argues that convergence in media and the
journalistic industry is not only a process of technological innovation and diffusion as
Dupagne and Garrison (2005) imply, it also involves with a transformation and
penetration of skills, ideas and practices in every bit of the media and journalistic
fields – this is encapsulated in a journalistic culture. Convergent journalism has thus
been seen as a cultural shifting takes place within actors and structure in this paper.
My empirical data is collected by adopting qualitative research methods, which
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