Quantitative Research Study Plan

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For more than a century, the newspaper industry has been a dominant source of news in the U.S. (Stephens, 2010). Newspapers have experienced substantial declines in circulation, advertising sales, profitability, and readership (Tucker, 2009). Some print newspaper organizations are transitioning to online news distribution models in an attempt to sustain their businesses. Such transitions require traditional print news media companies to conduct staff reductions, then offset the loss of high cost, highly trained journalists and editors through the addition of user generated news article content. This quantitative study focuses on the effectiveness of media company transitions from print to online through an evaluation of readers' trust in news media organizations, as well as readers' desire to read user generated articles written by citizen reporters.

Background Information

Several well established large syndicated print newspaper companies have closed their print distributions. In 2009, Rocky Mountain News, with a print run of about 350,000 copies (Tsai, 2009), and Seattle Post-Intelligencer represented two out of 105 victims of this trend. Also in 2009 alone, 10,000 newspaper jobs were lost, print ad sales fell 30% in the first quarter, and 23 of the top 25 newspapers reported substantial circulation declines in the range of 7% and 20% (Dumpala, 2009). One newspaper conglomerate, Gannett Co. Inc., has laid off more than 10,000 employees since 2007, while another major conglomerate, The Sun-Times Media Group, was forced to file for bankruptcy in April 2009 after losing $4.5 million per week between January and March of 2009 (Dumpala, 2009). As one journalist for the Atlantic pointed out, "We're not witnessing the breakup of ...

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