การปรับตัวของหนังสือพิมพ์ท้องถิ่นในจังหวัดเชียงใหม่ต่อการท้าทายของสื่อดิจิทัล

Abstract

The research is about Adjustment of Local Newspaper in Chiang Mai Province to the Challenge of Digital Media, aiming at studying factors that have impacts on organization management of local newspapers in the digital age and studying adaptation, policy making, strategies and practical ways of local newspaper to face the present social, economic and political context. The study relies on in-depth interview with executives and employees of Chiang Mai News and Thai News under the conceptual framework of newspaper organization management and technological determinism theory. The study found that factors on organization management of Chiang Mai News and Thai News in the digital age are uncontrollable. Three factors on the organization management are economic, social and culture, and technology factors. Those factors have both direct and indirect impacts on organizations, encouraging the administrators to adjust the internal organization for survival. The adaptation is divided into 4 parts: administration, production, personnel and budget. In terms of administration, the executives restructure organization based on national newspaper, particularly their vision to plan strategies and lead to new ones. Platform is expanded and social media is improved more obviously and related to social context in the digital age. For production, local newspaper Thai News increases a number of modern printing presses to increase the production capability and to support the platform expansion of the organization. Meanwhile, the local newspaper organizations do not significantly provide any plan for personnel development, but offer job opportunities for the ones specialized on social media field. At the same time, some employees lack knowledge and ability about technology which is the main problem, but can be solved by sharing knowledge among employees. Lastly, local newspaper boosts proactive marketing while expanding platform to attract more advertising because selling advertisement is their main income for survival. The local newspaper cannot sustain their business without adaptation. With this action, the local organizations will mainly follow the directions of the national newspaper and use it as the model for adaptation. Nevertheless, their adaptation will take long time because of limited investment. During the next 3 years (2018) they do not have clear adaptation ways yet.