The purpose of the study is to explore empirically how the news organizations' online publishing schedule practices have changed since the portal participated in news circulation. South Korean newspaper companies depend on the Naver portal for referra ...
The purpose of the study is to explore empirically how the news organizations' online publishing schedule practices have changed since the portal participated in news circulation. South Korean newspaper companies depend on the Naver portal for referral traffic. The strong hegemony of portal has caused controversy about the news that they select. It caused a variety of problems in the news environment. For example, News organizations repeatedly send their near-duplicate articles to portal sites to increase their exposure. This is referred to in South Korea as “abusing news.” However, the problems with portals were mainly discussed in terms of journalism. There has been little discussion of its impact on media organizations and journalist working condition. Therefore, this study focused on the changes in online news publishing schedule practices for the portal. As exploratory research, it provides an insight on how portal has influenced the news distribution environment.
The eleven daily newspapers (i.e. Kyunghyang, Kookmin, Naeil, Donga, Munhwa, Seoul, Segye, Chosun, Joongang, Hankyoreh and Hankook), the six economic newspaper (i.e. the Seoul Economy, the Asian Economy, the Financial News, the Korean Economy and the Herald Economy), and the seven sports newspapers(i.e. Sports Donga, Sports Seoul, Sports World, Sports Chosun, Sports Hankook and Daily Sports) were selected for analysis. Furthermore, this study selected three wired services (i.e. News 1, Newsis, and Yonhap News), which do not have printed paper, to compare the publishing pattern. The total number of articles was 49,785,412. In addition to the data from the portal, this study used the press directory to investigate the changing news outlet's workforce.
The conclusion of this study is summarized as follows. First, in the early days of online journalism, the news organizations with a printed paper showed the publishing pattern concentrated at a certain time. However, after the portal become dominant in online news distribution, the daytime online news circulation becomes generalized. For example, in the early days of the portal, daily newspapers published online between 6:00 pm and 8:00 pm after printed paper editing closed, but now the proportion of the daytime publishing is increased. Furthermore, the practice which the 3:00 am online publishing also increased confirms that news organization adopted a new practice in coordinating the exposure time for both printed and online readers.
Second, the analysis of the publishing time of the articles sent to the portal shows that news outlets have an M-shaped publishing pattern. After 7:00 am, the proportion of published articles increases, and at lunchtime, the proportion of published articles decreased. After lunchtime, it increased again to the closing time. Not only daily newspapers but also economic newspapers and sports newspapers are showing a similar tendency, which increasing daytime online publishing. That is, it reveals that the portal is used as an online news circulation path for contacting with readers, unlike in the early stage of article oriented distribution.
Third, it confirms the findings of previous research that journalists feel burnout in dealing with both online and printed news (Jung & Kim, 2012). Journalists are writing online articles during the weekly time as much more than the number of articles for printed news. From 2000 to 2014, the number of journalists increased by 21.8%, while the number of articles sent to portals increased by 674.3%. It suggests that the journalists' workload is increasing.