Preliminary Research Topic

     My research interested lies in that how mobile phone/tablet change the media structure, dynamic of competition between traditional news media, online news media and news on mobile phone/tablet.

  

     According to an annual report on American Journal (The state of the news media 2013), people with mobile phone/tablet spend more time consuming news than they did before. That is to say, mobile phone/tablet are becoming the major media for people getting news. Our habit of consuming news is changing rapidly with the launch of mobile phone/tablet. According to the same report (The state of the news media 2013), “Most mobile news users are not replacing one platform with another; they are consuming more news than they had in the past.” It also raises my interest that will there be “cannibalization effect” of mobile phone/tablet on online media and traditional media? 

  

     In addition, since the current trend of getting news is toward mobile phone/tablet, can media companies make profit on the advertising in mobile phone/tablet?  In order to answer these questions, we may need to know that, how to define media structure, how is the competition relationship between traditional, online, and mobile media?  Based on previous study on online news, it is modality, not content that influences reader’s usage of media (Thurman & Myllylahti, 2009), here comes to my concern that how about mobile phone/tablet, will it be the same as people consuming online news?

    Traditional media is struggling, online media was thought to be the future of traditional media. Here comes the rapid growth of mobile phone/tablet, ultimately, I want to figure out that will the mobile phone/tablet be the solution of the demise of traditional media?

     The scope of my research topic is still broad. Either newspaper on mobile device or cable TV on mobile is considered to be the objects of the research.

Some related article:

Chyi, H.I.,& Huang, J. S. (2012). Demystifying the demand relationship between online and print products under one newspaper brand: the case of Taiwan and the emergence of a universal pattern. Asian Journal of Communication. 21(3), 243-261.

Chyi, H. I.,& Sylvia, G. (2010). Are Long-Distance Users an Inconvenient Truth? Profiling U.S. Newspapers’ Online Readership in the Dual-Geographic Market. The International Journal on Media Management, 12:93–112.

Cha, J.,& Chan-Olmsted, S. M. (2012). Substitutability between Online Video Platforms and Television. Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly.89: 261-278.

Thurman, N., & Myllylahti, M. (2009). Taking the paper out of news. Journalism Studies, 10(1), 1-18.

The state of the news media 2013. Retrieved from: http://stateofthemedia.org/2013/digital-as-mobile-grows-rapidly-the-pressures-on-news-intensify/