Social Media Impact on Traditional Journalism Content Change and Reader Behavior Analysis

Abstract

With the rapid development of social media, the number of netizens using social media such as microblogging, WeChat, and forums is growing rapidly, and there are more and more channels to obtain news information. This study introduces “technological innovation” as the mediator variable, social media usage as the independent variable, traditional journalism content change, and reader behavior as the dependent variable, and age and political affiliation as the control variables to explore how social media plays its influential role. The survey study yielded a total of 896 valid data samples. Regression analysis using a PLS model was used to test the relevant hypotheses. The regression results show that without the introduction of the mediator variable “scientific and technological innovation”, social media has a significant effect on the content change of traditional news, and the R-squared explanation rate is 16.8%, which indicates that social media positively affects the content change of traditional news. Meanwhile, among the information content of social media, life and medical information (β=0.075, P<0.05) and current affairs and social information (β=0.112, P<0.001) positively affect the reader behavior of traditional journalism, which indicates that social media has a significant impact on influencing the reader behavior of traditional news. After the introduction of the “scientific and technological innovation” variable, the core value of the previous regression model decreases and becomes significant, indicating that scientific and technological innovation plays a mediating role in the above influence path.

Keywords

• social media
• mediating variable
• pls regression
• 78a48