(Person) Percentage - Sabanci University Research Database

The Asian Media & Mass Communication Conference 2010 Osaka, Japan
severe economic recession since 2000 which has led to a serious slip of commercial
profits for all news media. Newspapers are in an even more serious situation among
all media due to the challenge of broadcasting and the emergence of Internet media.
From the perspective of most newspapers, ‘being digital and convergent’ are two
strategies to save their decreasing circulation. One the one hand, digitizing news
content enables newspapers to provide content for the online environment and to
integrate multimedia stories to attract young consumers to read them. On the other
hand, the process of integration of different media formats means that the companies
are able to reduce their labor costs.
Via interviewing and observing journalists’ and editors’ work, I found that Taiwan’s
media convergence in the press industries is centered on three major types of
newsroom convergence: (1) the single integrated newsroom; (2) the coordination and
cooperation newsroom; and (3) the big-platform newsroom. The different models of
newsroom convergence influence the journalists’ and editors’ daily production
practices.
1. Everyday production practices in the single integrating newsroom
The first type of newsroom convergence identified here is the single integrating
newsroom. In this independent newsroom, integrated news production is principally
produced by an individual journalist or editor, which means that all news workers in
this single convergent newsroom need to possess multiple-skills. Domigo et, al. (2007)
indicates that this kind of convergence in fact links to a redefinition of professional
roles, technological innovation and the development of new news formats and
languages.
In the integrated newsroom, technology learning seems to be one of the issues studied
by media scholars (Deuze, 2008; Klinenberg, 2005). However, most news workers I
interviewed show a positive attitude toward technologies learning. For example, one
journalist who covers economic news indicates that learning new skills increase his
‘capital,’ so he does not reject new technologies (Respondent A, male, journalist from
the United Daily).
The critical questions about new technologies and journalism practice in a convergent
newsroom lie on two dimensions. The first one is the difficulty of combining and
managing different narratives and languages brought by various new technologies
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