(Person) Percentage - Sabanci University Research Database

The Asian Media & Mass Communication Conference 2010 Osaka, Japan
includes ethnographic interviews at the news workers’ working places, observations
and second hand data to explore what the journalists and editors actually do and say in
relation to media convergence, and how their practices in this context influence news
reports.
This article first reviews the existing studies of the influences of convergence on the
media and news industry. After this, I introduce the present condition of the
newspaper industry in Taiwan. Then I outline the main research methods used before
turning to the findings from my empirical study of several Taiwanese convergent
cases in the press industries.
Convergence and practices of making news
Convergence in electronic communication generally refers to all modes of
communication being integrated into one grand system via electronic technology
(Pool, 1983, cite in Gordon, 2003:58). In media and journalism studies, convergence
refers to the bringing of all forms of media content together, which appears to be a
common phenomenon in the digital environment. Scholars have argued that
convergence in media cannot simply be reduced to technical integration. As Rich
Gordon (2003) acknowledges, convergence involves an integration of ownership,
information gathering, news organization and news presentation.
For media and journalism, convergence usually contains two concurrent independent
trends: (1) the convergence in the media and news industries means the establishment
of a multimedia newsroom and integrated news companies; and (2) the convergence
of media production and consumption, which refers to using the citizen-consumers as
a source or co-creator of news reports, opinions and analysis (Allan & Thorsen, 2009;
Jenkins, 2004; Jenkins & Deuze, 2008).
In reference to the first trend mentioned above, Quinn (2005) suggests that media
managers adopt convergence with two main goals, improving the quality and reducing
production costs. However, many scholars’ empirical research studies have argued
that in certain cases, the media organizations’ convergent actions are far from
increasing the quality of news reports. On a contrary, media convergence usually
involves greater marketing and maintenance of customer relations; advertising and
product cross-promotion (Gordon, 2003). Huang et al. (2006) find that there is a
growing concern among media scholars that related cross-promotion and content
sharing derived by convergence could harm the diversity of news viewpoints.
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