Study On Usage Of Mobile News And Impact Factors

With the rapid development of mobile internet, mobile news has been welcomed by most users in China. News organizations and We-Media are putting mobilization convergence into effect and trying to attract the users to their products in different platforms. Though mobile news communication has gradually received much attention from the government, media organizations, advertisers and venture capital, little attention has been paid to the use of mobile news by researchers in the communication discipline. Thus, this study aims to reveal the impact factors of mobile news usage at levels of channel, platform and source from the perspective of the whole process of use.In the research of mobile news channel adoption, this thesis introduces a research framework which reflects the relationship of gratification-opportunities together with gratification-utility and media consumption time on the basis of the niche theory. The empirical results indicate that the mobile media has a competitive displacement effect in time consumption on other media in the daily news domain. Meanwhile, the mobile media has a competitive superiority on other media on gratification opportunities and gratification-utility dimensions. Most importantly, the latter two gratification dimensions can explain the approximately 90% of the time displacement.In the research of mobile platform(including APP, mobile websites, weibo or wechat) selection, this thesis develops a research model which reflects the impacts of user, product and platform characteristics on user mobile news platform selection. The empirical results suggest that time spent consuming mobile news is not related to the size of mobile platform repertoires. There are two patterns of platform choice in users‘ channel repertoires, exclusive use of one platform and complementary use of multiple platforms, indicating one platform is used for a variety of news categories and multiple platforms are used for the same news category. Personal innovativeness, mobile news use experience, user motivation and platform characteristics have partly influenced the intensity of platform usage.In the research of mobile news source(i.e. news provider) usage, this thesis constructs a research model based on the Stimulus-Organism-Response framework, incorporating both social influence factors and mobile news service quality as the stimuli. The empirical results show that the social influence factors of perceived similarity, perceived expertise and perceived popularity as well as mobile news service quality factors of information quality and interactivity quality are all important antecedents of users‘ cognitive, affective and participative engagement that positively predicts loyalty toward the source they use. In addition, user involvement partially mediates the relationship between the stimuli antecedents and user engagement.The thesis makes a theoretical contribution to research on news media niche, platform repertoires and media source usage, shedding light on the behavior of entrepreneurs on mobile news as the results can provide practical implications for the platform extension and product marketing.