The Differences Between News Categories On Mobile News App And News Portal

With the fast growing of mobile Internet in China, mobile news application, a new format ofcellphone-newspaper, is increasingly more popular now. Compared with traditional cellphone-newspaper, mobile news application has huge improvement in content format, news themes andaudience coverage. Benefiting from the technology improvement, mobile news application nowis participating in the agenda setting process actively in the new media environment.In China, top mobile news applications with highest utilization rate are all developed by PCportal websites. The daily operation and news themes picking of news application are conductedby PC portal websites as well. This article wants to investigate the differences between mobilenews application and PC news portal in terms of news themes; and further discuss the impactbrought by the differences.We collected1,520news themes as sample by stratified sampling method through trackingChina’s biggest4portals and their news mobile applications for4months. We coded and issuedthem different weighted value based on their positions on the interface of PC portal and mobileapplication. We combined the attention index of different news themes of4portals and theirmobile application; then analyzed the differences further. The last but not the least, weinterviewed3Internet news editor from2different portals and aim to cast light on the reasonsbehind the differences and their potential impact on China news environment.With the popularity of low-end smartphone, we believe that mobile news application willenjoy a bigger success in the future. Meanwhile, the integration with SNS also allows mobilenews application to provide a better platform for individual audience to speak on behalf ofthemselves. We believe that mobile news application and PC news portal will together exploringthe freedom boundary of China media industry.