Marshall McLuhan, the noted Canadian scholar of journalism, is known for the expression, 'The medium is the message.', by which he gave emphasis to the fact that his above expression is entirely true with no heed to the contents the medium delivers. W...
Marshall McLuhan, the noted Canadian scholar of journalism, is known for the expression, 'The medium is the message.', by which he gave emphasis to the fact that his above expression is entirely true with no heed to the contents the medium delivers. With technical innovations and expansion, the Internet is leading to the drastic changes of human society of the 21st century, which is equivalent to the Industrial Revolution. In addition, the year of 2009 turned out to be the 40th anniversary year of the Internet. Especially, in case of Korea it will not be an overstatement to mention that the use of the Internet expressly means that of the portal site, since most of the Internet users set up the portal site as the start page on their computers. As the portals thus evolved to be so important that they induced the crowding, which became widespread not only to information search, e-mail, messenger, free opinions through replies, a participation of users, for instance, such as diversified use of UCC, blog but also to the news access. With regard to the means of the news access, the use of the portals is trending upward, while that of television and newspapers downward. This stems from the fact that the portals allow the easy access to the news of many newspaper companies and the glancing of them as well.
Against the fact that, at first, online news service of the media websites preceded that of the portals, now it has been superseded by the latter. Under the circumstance, the researches have continuously investigated the various social problems of the so-called 'news boxes' of the portal front page. Namely, on one hand, there have been issues of the Korean-style portals constantly, such as the revision of headlines to be sensational, i.e., the portals' editorial right of the news, the relationship between news producer and news distributor and so forth, and, on the other hand, studies have been made consistently with the various academic approaches which included the effects of the user interactivity, agenda setting function, reversed agenda setting, etc. In particular, there was also a demand for institutional device to secure the impartiality and social responsibility of the portal news. Accordingly, the portals even suggested the system for polls of public opinion, such as users' committee, media responsibility committee and others, together with the guidelines for election campaign reports. Some portals, following the suit of the portal of Naver, attempted to introduce the press out-link system, which was eventually found not to be an alternative. Consequently, Naver which has the overwhelming share of the market, has arranged the so-called 'News Casting Open' system as the intermediary between the portal and media websites since January 1, 2009, which enabled the media websites to provide Naver with the news features after editing by themselves. This system has brought a small but nevertheless important change, by which the media websites became vigorous enough to have the opportunity to newly leap forward, based on the increase of news readers, traffic and sales of advertisements.
As a matter of fact, even though the portal News Casting Open system seemed to be a matter of course in terms of portal news service, it can be affirmed that the new system itself is a significant change in consideration of its connotation of portals' willingness to strictly play the sole role of news distributor by transferring the news editorial right to the newspaper companies. However, there was also the perspective that the new system has increased the dependence of the newspaper companies on the portals, while they competed fiercely with each other to join with the portals. Moreover, as of August 7, 2009, a new ruling came into effect with the change of the press arbitration law, which brought the portal news under the control of arbitration and mediation. This study investigated how the users recognized and evaluated the new system under the rapidly changing circumstances in relation to the portal news, and tried to review their motivation and behaviour patterns of the portals.
The study of this text also found the response that satisfaction scores of users with the portal News Casting Open system were above average. Analysis of variance of survey has deduced that a statistically meaningful difference exists in terms of 'gender and the degree of involvement' and 'gender and the reliability'. Correlation analysis of users' ages has found the age difference also has a statistically significant effect on 'age and credibility' and 'age and usefulness'. Furthermore, analysis of users' group of the portal news has shown that the relationship between Naver users' group and usability was suggestive and that users' convenience came close to the statistically somewhat meaningful degree. The findings also include that the impact of other factors is not prominent.
As to the news editing trend of the media websites in compliance with the portal News Casting Open System, the users responded that they did not perceive any difference, even though the news became soft. In case of newspaper sites, a noticeable change was revealed that users read articles additionally through the hyperlink. Regarding the revision of headlines of portal news, most of the respondents opposed it predominantly. On the future method of portal news service, users preferred the Open system and at the same time the method itself is confirmed not to be matter of their concerns.
It is clearly and factually confirmed that the Open System has brought the sweeping systematic changes to the media websites as well as the news users. In spite of the fact that the users do not notice the change and that, in view of the position dominated by the portals in the whole Korean society, the Open System is progressing toward the right direction in terms of news production and its distribution. In other words, the Open System is not the best solution, but it can be suggested that the Open System eased the crowding of the portals which remediated the news and brought the mutually beneficial opportunity to both the media websites and the portals.
Thus, this study can find its valuable meaning in presenting the working-level proposals for the future direction of the portal news by reviewing the change which the Open System has brought to the news surroundings and discussing how the news users have perceived the Open System.
Key words: Portal News Casting Open, Portal Journalism, Portal News, Portal News Users, Portal News Credibility, Portal News Users' behaviour Pattern