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1. Introduction
The smart phone fever has been widespread through the world recently, including in Taiwan. According to an annual report by Nielsen in 2012, the smart phone penetration rate in Taiwan had already reached fifty percent. In other words, there is one in two people owning a smart phone in Taiwan. Under the circumstance of the worldwide trend, in addition to two smart phone giants in the world, Apple and Samsung Electronics, HTC, a global brand founded in Taiwan, is in the third place of smart phone market share worldwide.
Founded in 1997, HTC built its reputation as the product designer and manufacturer of many popular OEM (Original Equipment Manufacturer) branded mobile devices on the market. Since 2006, HTC has regularly introduced mobile devices, including smart phones and tablets, under its own brand. In 2011, it entered into the top one hundred best global brands evaluated by Interbrands, one of world's largest brand consultancies, and ranked ninety-eighth in the annual report. This was the first time that a Taiwan-founded brand is listed after the evaluation of three key elements, the financial performance of the branded products or services, the role of brand in the purchase decision process, and the strength of the brand. In the same report, it described,
A rising star in the mobile devices segment, and a new entry to our Top 100 Best Global Brands, HTC surpassed Nokia to become the third largest smart phone maker in the world in market value, placing it only behind Apple and Samsung. Starting as an original equipment manufacturer (OEM) business, HTC has rapidly gained consumer traction at a global level earning it the title of the 2011 Device Manufacturer of the Year by the GSMA at the Mobile World Congress in February. (p. 43)
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Also, there have been various positive reports and complements to HTC worldwide. For example, an American weekly newspaper, Barron's, described HTC with the title of "a smart play on smart phones" that
If you thought the global smart phone market was a two-horse race between market leaders Apple and Samsung Electronics, think again. A third force, Taiwan's HTC, has a slew of pioneering next-generation smart phones, like the Thunder Bolt 4G, Amaze and Vivid, which work on faster networks to wow holiday shoppers. HTC is also a stock that might run faster than its nearest rivals.
Today, HTC has transformed itself from an OEM to a well-known global brand. Since HTC has been emerging all round the world, it also has been regarded as the pride and glory for people in Taiwan because, in the past, Taiwan only played a role as a product
manufacturer for other global brands. Therefore, people in Taiwan would especially treasure and closely watch this one of few "BIT (Branded in Taiwan)" companies due to that
country-of-origin and consumer patriotism positively influence the brand attitude and brand strength (Chen, 2010). And for local news coverage in Taiwan, this study assumes that local news coverage would also closely report this locally founded company from any source by different times that the company performs well or falls into the crisis.
1.1 HTC Public Relations and Journalism in Taiwan
In order to build up the brand images and good company reputation to consumers and stakeholders locally in Taiwan, there are several ways for HTC public relations practitioners in the case of external communication, for example, Internet word of mouth effects, celebrity testimonials and media advertisements. Moreover, a relatively inexpensive way is to offer
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corporate news releases to newspaper journalists and editors as a part of the media news coverage reported to audiences. And this process is referred to as information subsidies, highlighting how information serves as an economic commodity exchanged between journalists and news sources (Gandy, 1982). Pavlik (1987) called the relationship between public relations sources and journalists a "symbiotic" one, because public relations
practitioners depend on media to distribute their messages to the public, meanwhile, media journalists and editors rely on sources from public relations practitioners to access to the business information.
Economically speaking, for journalists and news organizations, reporting the news carries several costs, and news releases are able to reduce the costs of reporting the news, which have been labeled "routine channel news." And this routine process will be able to exert greater influence on the news agenda (Kennamer, 1992). McCombs (2004) in his book Setting the Agenda, found that nearly half of news stories were substantially based on press
releases and other direct information subsidies in the examination of the New York Times and Washington Post across a twenty-year period. There are 17.5 percent of total number of news stories appearing in newspapers based on press releases, and other 32 percent based on press conferences and background briefings in the same finding. Hence, McCombs pointed out that information subsidies, as the key role, play in the daily construction of all media agendas. He also explained that without press releases or subsidies routinely provided by public relations
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professionals, the media agenda would be considerably changed in the news content. After all, he stated, "agenda-setting is a significant part of what public relations is about."
1.2 Research Purposes
Based on the mutual subsidies directly and indirectly for sources and journalists, this study intends to explicate the influence of news releases through the agenda-setting theory as the theoretical framework, especially examining, the second-level agenda setting,
attribute-salience relationship between corporate news releases and print news coverage.
Setting the corporate itself and its reputation as the object in the media agenda, a measurement, Reputation Quotation, is utilized in the content analysis in this study to examine attributes of agenda.
There are two major purposes served, on the one hand, this study is designed to gain a better understanding of corporate news releases in the agenda-setting perspective and provide a broader portrait for future studies for the reason that most previous research in the past related to the news release and its influence to media agenda mainly focused on politics, elections, and other political issues. Therefore, this study intends to serve as a further
explication and a consolidation for the agenda-setting theory, especially the second level, on media content in the field of public relations and business.
On the other hand, this study discusses the influence of news release by the corporate public relations practitioners and also examines how much journalists and editors in Taiwan
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depend on the corporate news releases, as a practical business reference for reputation management and public relations activities in the corporations and news organizations in Taiwan.
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