Preliminary Study On Customized Sports News On Mobiles Based On The Uses And Gratification Theory

In the era of information, a great deal of information penetrates everywhere through mobile internet. And now, its disadvantages are revealing themselves gradually. Users are surrounded by large quantity of data, and are put in a tight spot of “information overflow”. Hence, it is inevitable to customized sports news through mobiles. “Information overflow” has challenged both information receivers and providers for sports news. However, this challenge also contains great commercial and cultural values implying that whoever grasping readers’ interests, preferences and their characteristics holds the control of voice in sports news media on mobiles, and sometimes even holds the control of sports news media on internet.Sports news customization, based on interests and preferences of receivers, means to provide sports news meeting receivers’ tastes. In order to do that, it has to find suitable sports news from the voluminous sports news quickly so as to save time for users, improve efficiency and increase users’ engagement, as well as fractionize receiver markets and achieve the transformation from accepting sports news passively to pushing sports news actively. Customized sports news, because of its convenience and absolute necessity of having smart devices, has further deepened its values for smart phones have made it possible for common people to access sports news and closely connected receivers. Thus, the coverage of sports news has expanded further.From the perspective of sports news customization in mobile terminal, the author takes Sina, Baidu, Sohu, Netease, IFENG and ZAKER as examples, and analyses the current situation of customized sports information on mobile platform by summarizing, collecting, and comparing them. Also, the author carries out questionnaire about the feedback from users of sports news customization in mobile terminal, and based on the study of use and gratification theory, the author finds out their gratification with sports news customization in mobile terminal mainly includes two parts. One is users’ cognitive gratification which comes from an abundance of sports news information, immediate updating of sports news, immersive experience ofsports news and various forms of news. The other is users’ emotional gratification including unique personalized news tag customization which satisfies their curiosity and dominant desire, possibility of comments and communication which meets their interactive demand, and entertainment which can relieve users from pressure. The author also analyses the deficiencies in sports news customization in mobile terminal, including a risk of users’ privacy leakage, a blind and irrational promotion of news customization, improper development orientation of customization, outdated techniques and algorithms, a lack of diversification among all these sports news customizations in mobile terminal and incomprehensive customization functions. The author then comes up with some solutions and suggestions accordingly, including improving the summarization of clients’ service data, full understanding of users’ customization demand, improving the readability of customized sports news in mobile terminal, promoting the reduction of wireless communication charges, and diversifying sports news customization. The author aims to make contribution to the sound and constant development of sports news customization in mobile terminal, and hopes his expectation based on its development trend can benefit our future.