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Spain is a popular residence for Swedish lifestyle migrants. One of the largest groups among these migrants consist of retirees, seeking sun, an improved lifestyle and lower cost of living. Costa del Sol, is among the most cherished places to move to, where swedes reside alongside Brits, Germans and other Scandinavians. Here you can find Swedish doctors, a Swedish school and several Swedish media outlets. Prior studies have found these migrants to maintain strong connections to their home countries, maintaining habits and way of life – with little or no integration to Spanish society.  Where previous research has answered questions about integration and transnationalism, this study contributes to an understanding of the role of media. Using a qualitative interview-based methodology, it regards media use among Swedish retirees residing permanently on Costa del Sol – aiming to explain motivations and disclose reasons behind habits. Nine interviews were conducted through a lens of Uses & gratification theory. The interviews regarded their media consumption of various outlets, including news media and entertainment media in various languages, as well as local news media in Swedish found on Costa del Sol. Additional contextualization and compilation of previous research provided further comprehension of Swedish society in southern Spain.  Results found that keeping up with daily events in Sweden is a core motivation for media consumption. Staying informed about your home country was found to be considerably more important than the new one, apart from local news consumption. Media consumption achieves multiple gratifications, motivating an overall high consumption of many different media outlets. Several sub-themes were discovered and categorized within McQuail:s Uses & gratification definitions of entertainment, social relation, identity and surveillance. These were interpreted, analyzed and compared to previous research.

The introduction of Social Media (SM) into sports communications in professional leagues is disrupting the traditional methods of sports media relations. In the past, teams used websites to post information for fans, but it was strictly a one-way format of communication whereby a story was posted for fans to read. To fully engage with this new communication channel, the sports communications departments in professional leagues have begun to use SM to communicate directly with fans through platforms like Twitter and Facebook. Currently, SM like Twitter allows the team communication departments to communicate directly with fans in an interactive two-way format that is not mediated by a reporter or someone from a traditional media outlet. In addition, the open format of SM means that media relations staff are no longer the only intermediary between the media and the players; through the use of SM like Twitter, a professional athlete can now communicate directly to fans without gatekeepers like the media or the sports communications department of the team. This thesis will explore how SM has changed media relations from several different perspectives. The first perspective is related to the risks that are associated with the use of SM by professional athletes: without an intermediary or a filter for athlete-fan communication, many athletes have caused irreparable damage to their reputation and the reputation of their team. The second perspective is related to the benefits for teams that use SM as a platform to connect with fans: the ability to connect with fans using SM is new to sports communications and represents an interactive one-to-one and one-to-many mode of communication through which the fan can directly communicate with the team. Finally, this research will look at how Twitter has changed media relations in sports from the perspective of the lived experiences of people who work in sports media. To explore the risks associated with athletes’ use of social media, this research used Situational Crisis Communication Theory as a theoretical framework to explore reputation-damaging incidents that occurred through social media. The study reviewed national media stories reported in North America from 2009 to 2010 that were perceived to have negative impact on athletes’ reputation. In total, 17 incidents were reviewed — seven incidents in particular demonstrated the athlete as the source of the SM crisis. Through the review and categorization of these 17 situations, the study was able to identify four broad categories of situations that a sports communication manager needs to be prepared for. The four categories identified were “Rookie Reporter”, “Team Insider”, “Opportunist”, and “Imposter”. Each of these categories are invaluable for team communication managers to recognize in order to address the risks associated with social media. To explore the benefits associated with the communications department’s use of social media, this research used Uses and Gratification theory as a theoretical framework to explore how and why fans followed team Twitter accounts. This study was conducted in partnership with the Canadian Football League (CFL) and a total of 526 people responded to an online survey that was tweeted out to them for their feedback. The results of the survey indicated several significant findings — in particular, the phenomenon of converged sports fan consumption was identified, which has not been previously acknowledged in academic research. The phenomenon of converged sports fan refers to the multi-screen environment whereby a sports fan decides where, when, and how they want to consume sporting content. This research identified that in-game consumption of SM while watching television and the mobile consumption of SM are both dominant ways for fans to interact with their teams. This multi-modal format of connecting with the team supports the idea of Henry Jenkins’s Black Box Fallacy (2006, p. 13): as teams move forward in developing communications platforms to reach their fans, they will need to recognize that all channels can and do work together. In order to further understand how Twitter has changed sports media relations, the study used long semi-structured interviews with a phenomenological research design to understand how Twitter has impacted sports media relations. The phenomenological analysis of the informant interviews suggested that Twitter is the source of three themes of change: general media relations, mechanical job functions, and other changes specific to sports media relations. The significance of Twitter’s impact on sports media relations cannot be understated. With the ubiquitous use of SM like Twitter, it is important to understand how sports media relations can use SM to manage the image of their respective teams and athletes. After looking at SM and sports from three different perspectives, the pivotal finding was the role that Twitter and mobile communications play in ‘flattening’ sports media relations. Similar to how Friedman (2006) argued that the convergence of the personal computer drove globalization, Twitter and the increased adoption of mobile communications have flattened the role of sports media relations. This research will explain how the flattening of sports media relations happened and what the implications might be for sports media professionals.

The media landscape has evolved significantly over the last decades. Previously, the extent of media choice was limited to a handful of newspapers and radio- and TV broadcasts. However, with the rise of cable TV and internet access, people are faced with a multitude of choices regarding what media and content they choose to consume. Scholars have argued that these developments may enable people who are not interested in news consumption to avoid news more than previously. Considering this transformation of the media landscape, this paper aspires to shed light on the factors that affect news media choice. More specifically, the aim of this essay is to study upper secondary school students’ news interest, news consumption and their trust in news media.   This essay employs uses and gratifications and Bourdieu’s symbolic and cultural capital theory to analyze the empirical data. This data is based on 6 semi-structured interviews with students in the first or second year in two upper secondary schools.  The analysis demonstrates that parents’ political interest in addition to students’ uses and gratifications are significant to understand news interest and news consumption among upper secondary school students. Furthermore, the analysis highlights that the interviewees with higher cultural capital perceive news media with a higher symbolic capital as more trustworthy, while students with a lower cultural capital trust tabloid media to a greater extent.

Social media marketing has gained tremendous attention in recent years and has become a powerful tool for companies, entrepreneurs and marketers to approach their target customers and cultivate longtime customer relationship with increased engagement. Despite the increasing investment on social media marketing and the increasingly important roles users play today, few of previous studies, however, were focused on the user behavior or the key factors that influence user engagement with brands on social media. We chose the technology acceptance model (TAM) and uses and gratifications theory (UGT) as our theoretical foundation to investigate user behaviors on social media and the factors that influence user engagement with brands. We tested our model in two different social media platforms; Facebook and Instagram. The conclusions were based on inputs from a survey with 126 respondents with diverse background and age groups. We tested the hypotheses utilizing statistic correlation analyses. Among the five researched variables, H1 (perceived usefulness) and H5 (motivation for information) are proved to be statically significant. Despite a number of limitations, our research sheds a light on the study of user behavior on social media platforms. Understanding user behavior is useful for entrepreneurs and marketers in shaping more efficient ways to target the right audience on the right platform(s) to achieve their marketing objectives by effectively exploiting the potential of social media.

Social network sites (SNSs) have become a common part of everyday life for billions of people worldwide. Not everyone uses the same sites, nor are sites functionally equivalent in the eyes of users. Both established platforms and new upstarts may provide novel features or access to new audiences, yet users tend to remain on a few dominant platforms, especially Facebook, the world's reigning social network site. The goal of the present study is to understand why people are committed to specific social network sites, given that no site encompasses either all of a person's social connections or all possible gratifications available from online participation. Further, individuals do not always wish to have a single real-name identity for all online interactions, thus implying the necessary use of multiple accounts or sites. To understand SNS commitment, this study employs a mixed-methods research design by combining findings from a survey of 800 respondents with 50 semi-structured interviews. The research focuses on young adults in the UK and their use of four popular SNSs: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Snapchat. Findings indicate that network size has only a marginal effect on commitment, whereas the effect of identity performance is more pronounced, albeit in different ways on different sites. Social and informational gratifications have the strongest effect across all four SNSs, suggesting that commitment is primarily driven by repeated habit-forming experiences. To further help explain SNS commitment, this thesis employs a typology of social media users based on attitudes towards digital technology. It is evident that attitudes explain more variation in commitment than either demographic factors or personality. Qualitative analysis reinforces this finding by showing how users employ specific gratification-based repertoires to determine which sites to use and when. These findings help advance research on affordances, self-presentation and SNS use, while also making practical recommendations for social media platforms.

Undersökningens avsikt är att granska video-centric webbplatsers användning bland Karlstads universitets studenter, varför och hur studenter använder webbplatserna. Undersökningen är baserad på Uses and Gratifications modellen.