本文抽樣調查台灣九家具代表性的新聞網站,檢視一系列促進台灣網路 新聞媒體參與的科技和社會因素。九個新聞網站是台灣排名居前的新聞網 站,包括傳統媒體 ( 報紙和電視 ) ,數字原生新聞媒體和新聞聚合網站。研究 分析四千多則新聞和其網 路平台特色,結果發現參與的熱度固然能從每則新 聞平均留言數看出,但讀者未必會以新聞來源作為是否參與的考量。並建議 「參與」可以作為新聞報導、留言評論品質和分享的新指標。

關鍵詞：網路新聞、社群媒體、數位參與

 

News organizations seeking to sustain themselves in the digital age need to embrace and practice “engaged journalism,” as Jake Batsell (2015) asserts in the Introduction to his book of the same name. Engagement, the author writes, is “the degree to which a news organization actively considers and interacts with its audience in the furtherance of its journalistic and financial mission” (p. 7). And yet, new media platforms also provide users with more options, allowing them to make choices about their media use. This study investigates a range of technological and social factors that contribute to the engagement of online news media in Taiwan. Nine top news websites become to address multimediality and interactivity of social media platform to cater to audience preferences in their news selection choices. These nine news websites are top brand news sites in Taiwan which include legacy media (newspaper and television), digital-native news outlets, and news aggregator websites. The analysis focuses on the following strategic responses: (a) top news sites launching of online versions; (b) online news media’s efforts to cover a greater variety of subject areas, as measured by special editorial sections produced, as this strategy essentially represents an effort to simulate the much greater content variety that readers can find online; and (c) news sites’ efforts to explore user engagement in online news interaction that may gain users’ positive perception of the connection. The research examines the relationships between the click share number of the issues, news headline strategies, and interactive features of top news websites. The data collected are based on a six months’ time period from August 2018 to January 2019. The results also suggest that the hypertextuality of index-type online news sources is of particular importance. Multimediality and interactivity did not influence interactivity perceptions. These results support the perspective that online media differ based on subjects diversity and users’ connection are in part based on the technological affordances of media. A major contribution of this research lies in the empirical demonstration of the relationships between technological and social characteristics of various online news outlets and subsequent active engagement assessments and feedback.

Keywords: online journalism, social media, digital engagement