| This study investigates a variety of factors that have driven the creation of, and changes in, the Catholic Archdiocese of Seoul's official website, GoodNews. Specifically, this study explores factors driving the beginning and three changes of GoodNews, i.e., the Sunday e-Bulletin in Sound service, the news service and the UCC service. In doing so, media ideology of the Catholic Church is critically considered. This research, moreover, adopts diverse theoretical perspectives from religion and media studies, Library and Information Science (LIS), and technology studies (SCOT), considering both text and context as proposed by cultural studies.;The Church's core understanding of mass media is summarized in the term 'means of social communication' as it signifies the social and moral dimensions of mass media. Unity and solidarity, according to media ideology of the Catholic Church, should be the primary purpose of mass media. This media ideology is clearly reflected on GoodNews, and various social groups are involved in the process of the GoodNews construction. The Sunday e-bulletin in sound is a networked change in an intermediating website, which passed the filter of ideological compatibility and managerial considerations. At the core of the evolution of the news service, there is the work of news management computer technology. A variety of factors is related to the evolution of the news service (i.e., the media ideology of the Church, goals, work practices of Catholic media organizations, socio-historical changes both in and outside of the Church, varying technological conditions and managerial behaviors). Two notable bases for the UCC service development are found, which are support from the System team as a technical (material) base, and the technology frame of the UCC as a conceptual base. The variety of factors that has driven the creation of, and changes to GoodNews is summarized into ideological, technological, managerial and situational factors. With its synthetic consideration of the various factors, the present study attempts to increase the depth of, as well as the intensity of, the institutional-level analysis of religious media. |
