The diffusion and social impact of online news: Studying the past and present to understand the future of the Internet as a news medium

This thesis attempts to fill in the general gap in scholarly research into the diffusion and social impact of online news both inside and outside Australia. Using historical and survey data, it explores the past and present of online news development to predict its future in both terms of online news production (a producer-centric perspective) and online news uses (a user-centric perspective). In particular, the thesis aims to investigate social and technological factors that influence the adoption and use of online news and online news technologies in the newsroom and among the general public, with a stronger focus on the latter. Beginning with the industrial context of the 1990s, when the world-wide web generated hyperbole about the Internet as a powerful news medium, the thesis goes back to the pre-web history of online news businesses, exploring the interaction between technologies and society to argue that seeing the technical potential online news as the primary driver of its diffusion might be misleading. It then explores the uptake of online news in Australia within a global context, using empirical data from two national surveys to investigate socio-technical determinants of public adoption/use of online news and the effect of online news and information use on the use of traditional media sources. In order to do this, this thesis adopts and integrates a range of macro- and micro-level theories from the broad fields of media and communication studies, economics, psychology and sociology, including the evolutionary and social-conflict perspectives on media development (DeFleur & Ball-Rokeach, 1989); the governance of supervening social necessities and the law of suppression of radical potential in media history (Winston, 1998); innovation diffusion theory (Rogers, 2003); different uses and gratifications perspectives, especially the structural approach to media audience formation and expectancy-value theory (Blumler & Katz, 1974; McQuail, 1997; Palmgreen, 1983; Palmgreen & Rayburn, 1984; Rosengren, Wenner & Palmgreen, 1985). The key arguments and findings of the thesis include the following: From a producer-centric perspective, despite its seeming sudden emergence in the 1990s, online news like any other news form has been evolving for about 160 years from the crude form of consumer news services over the telegraph to news services over the telephone and the fax machine to videotex of the 1980s and todays Internet-based news. This evolution has taken place largely because of attempts by media businesses to expand and/or defend markets in the face of technologies. Like the Internet of the 1990s, the technological power of some pre-web online news forms generated much fear and excitement among traditional publishers/broadcasters. Some of these new technologies met with failure, some enjoyed a modest success, and some were off and on again. The success or failure of these online news services depends on diverse social factors such as legal environments, cultural norms, and certainly, market demands. More recently, the traditional medias defensive culture in dealing with new technologies has been acting both as accelerators and brakes on the development of online news. From a user-centric perspective, the study finds that the Internet has reached the status of a mainstream news medium, with its penetration still growing in Australia and other developed segments of the world. Along with this, public participation via online news platforms has become a crucial part of Internet culture. This fast penetration of online news into peoples life has been more or less driven by the mediums relative advantages over older media, defined across six dimensions: convenience of use, immediacy, content richness, news on demand, multimedia content/format, and participation opportunities. Of these, immediacy and content richness features are the most important technical determinants. In addition to online news attributes, the study finds a strong impact of three other groups of factors on the way online news is adopted, used and integrated into daily life: (1) social locators (education, income, employment status, job types, sex, age and living areas); (2) news orientation and behaviours (news needs, news dependency, general enjoyment of keeping up with the news, news use habits, and news exchange habits); and (3) Internet experience (the extent to which one can access, use, enjoy and depend on the Internet in daily life). Further, the analyses of survey data show that the more people receive news and information from the Internet, the more they do it from traditional sources, especially information-intensive sources like newspapers. Therefore, although old and new media do compete for peoples resources, they will complement rather than replace each other. The implications of these findings are discussed in detail in the final chapter. From a producer-centric perspective, the thesis concludes that as the Internet has established itself as a major news source, the same fear-driven innovation culture of traditional media that has been a major cause of their reluctance to invest in Internet news might soon lead to a second stage of its development, one in which the radical potential of online news will be more aggressively embraced. From a user-centric perspective, the thesis results in a forecasting model of online news adoption/use, which encompasses the above four groups of social and technical determinants, plus innovativeness (the extent to which one is open to and ready to adopt new technologies) a concept that is theoretically explored but not empirically tested in the thesis. This model implies that the Internet is widening the long-recorded information gap between people with high and low socio-economic status and between the technology haves and have-nots in society. The negative and positive implications of the development of public online participation for journalism and the public sphere as well other implications of online news uptake are also discussed