Study on Impacts of Facebook Page on News Production – Taking Four Major Newspapers in Taiwan as Examples

Autor: CHANG, YUEH-HAN, 張約翰
Rok vydání: 2019
Druh dokumentu: 學位論文 ; thesis
Popis: 107
Facebook in traditional Chinese version and iPhone simultaneously entered Taiwan in 2008, symbolizing that the times of social media and mobile device, which were called the new media in the 21st century, had arrived. Taiwan's news media were deeply impacted, its advertisement income had been on a slide and the once owned position had been replaced by the internet media. Among them, the printed media, specifically newspapers, was the most serious. In turn, this triggered the tide of digital transformation in Taiwan's four mainstream newspapers, which includes: Apple Daily, Liberty Times, United Daily News and China Times. Facebook became the focal point among digital strategies. Through the monthly data collection over a 67 months period, this study discovered that among the four mainstream newspapers, Apple Daily put the most emphasis on Facebook before 2017. However, after the continual downgrade of Facebook’s redirect algorithm, which resulted in the decline of usage data on websites of every newspaper, China Times in 2017 and Apple Daily in 2018 both ditched Facebook altogether. Furthermore, Apple Daily in 2019 even made a major change in its business model. Through data analysis from the websites and Facebook pages of the four mainstream newspapers, this study positioned its direction toward the exploration of the impact/influence Facebook had on news production in these four mainstream newspapers in the past 10 years. By using of internal documents “Innovation” in 2014 and “Our Path Forward” in 2015 from New York Times, both of which promoted the notion of “digital first,” as references, researchers interviewed the directors, journalists and social media managers of the four mainstream newspapers to explore the extent of the impact Facebook pages have on news production in mainstream newspapers in Taiwan. The results discovered that while utilizing Facebook pages to carry out the digital transformation, journalists of every newspaper all developed his/her own digital video and audio techniques, in addition to utilizing Facebook as information sources and acquisition. However, usage of Facebook pages also bought to surface a new issue --- difficulty in source verification. In order to adapt to the changes in Facebook algorithm, topic selection and presentation format in news production were all greatly impacted. At last, between journalists and social media managers in every newspaper, a “separation of church and state” had formed, which meant a lack of interaction, cohesiveness, and failure to establish a cooperative operational model between the two parties. Perhaps this operational model had thrived once before, but currently it is nowhere to be found.
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