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The Paralympic Games is the largest sporting competition for athletes with an impairment. This competition has, however, had limited news coverage in the past particularly compared to the Olympic Games. This study analyzes newspaper coverage of the 2016 Paralympic Games by two newspapers in 11 countries (China, Iran, Japan, Malaysia, Oman, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, South Africa, South Korea, Taiwan, and the United Kingdom). The coverage period spanned 7-19 September 2016. Text and pictures were coded according to page number, content, gender, sport, and nationality of person. Media content analysis was used to extract coverage of themes. Results are presented using descriptive statistics and frequency counts. Of the 623 articles and 541 photographs analysed, a small percentage (7.3%) were on the front pages of newspapers. Most articles and photographs (78.7%) were about athletes or teams. There was more coverage of male athletes (53.2%) and local athletes (71.6%). The Paralympic Games has historically received less newspaper coverage than the Olympic Games. This study examined newspaper coverage of the 2016 Paralympic Games from 11 countries. For the 2016 Rio Paralympic Games, newspaper coverage in most countries was good, lasting nearly the whole duration, and this also included a number of front page reports. The type of coverage and number of reports differ between countries. Generally, the highest medal winning countries gave more media attention to the Games. The news reports focused primarily on their local athletes and teams. Moreover, males had more news coverage than females overall. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Adopting an integrative approach of framing health determinants of drunken driving, this content-analysis study finds Taiwan's three major newspapers have failed to present holistic aspects of this social problem. News reports were filled with episodically event-driven details while widely ignoring thematically contextual health determinants, including socio-demographic factors, causal motives, and public policies. Moreover, news sources, notably police officers, representing an episodic orientation were predominantly used, while health experts, representing a thematic nature, were rarely quoted. The study also elaborates on theoretical and pragmatic implications from the findings in line with past research that the news media lack use of health determinants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cyber vigilantism, in particular crowdsourced vigilantism, is a newly emerging practice whereby people expose misconducts and identify culprits through collaboratively searching and publicizing information using the Internet. This study proposes a theory-oriented framework with which we demonstrate that individuals' media exposure and perceived social norms may interact and jointly predict their reception of and reactions to the practice. We tested the framework with web survey data of 800 adults in Taiwan. Results showed that the frequency and the ways in which the press covers cyber vigilantism were both directly and indirectly associated with individuals' acceptance of or resistance to cyber vigilantism. The indirect associations were mediated by individuals' evaluations and perceived social acceptance of the practice. We suggest that obtaining favorable news coverage is essential for cyber vigilantism to gain acceptance and attract crowds. When modeling or predicting the structure and evolving process of this newly emerging cyber practice, researchers may want to consider the overall media environment, social context, and personal evaluations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There have been recent calls in mobilities literature for greater engagement with how mobility regimes are shaped and governed at different scales. In relation to cycling-related mobilities scholarship, there are very few accounts situating cycling within broader bio-political and political–economic processes. This paper seeks to address this absence, situating contemporary formations of cycling culture within processes of capital accumulation and economisation. The research is based upon a series of interviews with industry stakeholders, participant observations at cycle events and analysis of policy documents and news media in Taiwan from 2015–2017. We demonstrate that in the last 10–15 years there has been a drive to create cycling subjects in the Taiwanese cycle industry, mass events and through public bike sharing with the loosely strategised goal of projecting an image of a cycling culture that it is hoped will be advantageous to the domestic bicycle industry. We demonstrate how this emergent process of fixing works through economisation of social cycling practices, themselves reliant on processes of division, classification and subjectification. We also show how the cycling subjects and cultures thus formed constitute qualculative framings that facilitate ongoing commercial re-evaluation of Taiwanese Brand manufacturers by other actors within the industry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Under the development of digital convergence, more and more mergers and acquisitions are taking place across media industries. In the past few years, most studies on horizontal mergers and acquisitions examine the concentration ratios or on vertical cases concerning entry barriers that block new entrants. Few research papers have discussed the impact of cross-media merger and acquisition and how to calculate the index. Thus, this paper introduces the experiences of index construction and application from the U.S., Germany, and South Korea, in order to provide a better analysis and concentration measurement index across different media for Taiwan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mobile phone is a necessary gadget for modern people nowadays. More and more users consume news and media content from smartphones via news applications or social media platform. It is important for news portals to understand young generation deeply to provide suitable service. This study introduces the method of taxonomy of experience (ToE) and its analytic approach of SEEing to understand college students’ user experience of Taiwanese news applications on smartphones. Users were encouraged to express their feelings, opinions, and operation processes during the testing via the approach of ‘think aloud’. The analytic approach of SEEing includes nine steps to categorise and analyse users’ verbal commentary. More importantly, user experience is analysed via clear missions of each steps. A total of 80 participants were invited to evaluate four news applications that were developed by media in Taiwan. Each news application was evaluated by 20 participants. The outcomes show that the users’ experience of news applications include the expectation of quick understanding, sharing, consistency, fun, importance, diversity, interests, and a wide range of topics. The outcome of this study provides an alternative way for news providers in Taiwan to re-evaluate what the users’ real desires of news applications are. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Integrating the uses and gratifications theory (U&G theory) with the dual mediation hypothesis (DMH), this research proposes and empirically tests a model aimed at understanding how a ripple effect, a phenomenon that causes marketing messages to diffuse more extensively due to the message receivers’ decisions to spreading the messages through their social networks, is created in virtual communities. A total of 599 Facebook (FB) Fan Page users in Taiwan were recruited and the Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) was used to test the research hypotheses. The results of our revised model showed that both perceived news entertainment and perceived news informativeness positively influenced the interestingness dimension of attitude toward the news, the hedonic dimension of attitude toward the FB Fan Page and the utilitarian dimension of attitude toward the FB Fan Page. The hedonic and utilitarian dimensions of attitude toward the FB Fan Page resulted in eWOM intentions (intention to give, pass and obtain information). The interestingness dimension of attitude toward the news plays an important mediating role in the proposed model. Based on the findings, implications and future research suggestions are provided. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Applying text mining techniques to legal issues has been an emerging research topic in recent years. Although some previous studies focused on assisting professionals in the retrieval of related legal documents, they did not take into account the general public and their difficulty in describing legal problems in professional legal terms. Because this problem has not been addressed by previous research, this study aims to design a text-mining-based method that allows the general public to use everyday vocabulary to search for and retrieve criminal judgments. The experimental results indicate that our method can help the general public, who are not familiar with professional legal terms, to acquire relevant criminal judgments more accurately and effectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article studies media coverage of the ‘921’ Earthquake in Taiwan during two periods in 2009, ten years after the disaster, which occurred on 21 September 1999 (the date which provided the event with its compressed identifier). First it looks at coverage in the wake of another major disaster (Typhoon Morakot) that occurred just before the tenth anniversary of the earthquake, and then during the regular tenth anniversary commemorations of the earthquake. Using narrative analysis, this article notes that during the first period, journalists responded to a disaster event with an historical precedent by adopting the 921 Earthquake as a benchmark, ‘villain’, and moral allegory to explain the current disaster and forecast future closure. During the second period, this study shows how journalists used regular commemorative features on the 921 Earthquake to describe that event based on survivor testimony and present commemorative events. By portraying two interpretations of a single past event back to back, this study demonstrates how news media selectively employ the ‘usable past,’ and the implications of this for the formation of collective memories of past events. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article assesses the present state of political communications in Taiwan through a close analysis of the perceived relationship between journalists and politicians. This relationship is examined within the context of media commercialization. Based on the assumption that in cultures of democratic political communication the interaction between media and political actors involves both conflict and cooperation, we consider how journalists and politicians negotiate the balance of power between them. The empirical evidence gathered from semistructured interviews for this article suggests that the interaction between media and political elites in Taiwan is defined by high levels of conflict, hostility, mutual suspicion, and mistrust—attributes of a relationship that can have profound implications for the legitimacy and efficacy of institutions, actors, and political communications in a newly created democratic system. The article explains the evidence through the perspective of the “knowledge deficit model” that operates within the context of media commercialization. This indicates that the perceptions (of the public, journalists, and politicians) of the formal aspects of democracy may have been transformed, but the nuances that define the application of democratic norms (the practice of responsible journalism) remain ambiguous. More importantly, huge market pressures and the widely accepted media logic, coupled with the democratic knowledge deficit, are creating a vicious cycle in the practice of political communication in Taiwan. This perhaps provides some tentative explanation for the brisk deterioration of expectations about democracy and the media's role in it, as well as the quality of democratic political communication in Taiwan. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Adopting the Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) approach, this study analyzes and discusses the news report related to Taiwan's first lady Wu Shu-chen's interview with the media which appeared in two ideologically opposed newspapers, i.e. the pro-reunification United Daily News and the pro-independence Liberty Times. Both news articles are translated from an identical English text. However, based on analysis of headlines, editorial deletion and addition, syntactic and lexical variations, as well as stylistic differences in paragraph/thematic combination, we have found that noticeable changes are made by the two translated Chinese versions. We argue that these transformations and differences found in the two Chinese texts are not arbitrary, but rather are ideologically motivated, that is, they reflect and construct the underlying opposed ideologies between the two newspapers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Investigates competition among three news media in Taiwan by adopting niche theory from organizational ecology. Examination of the level of perceived gratification provided by television news, electronic news, and newspaper news; Indication that strong competition exists between newspapers and television news, and that television news has gained superiority over newspapers; Outlook for future studies.

The article reports on the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) positive organ blunder caused by transplant team and a laboratory technician of the National Taiwan University Hospital in Taiwan.