Newspapers and Cross-Level Communications on Social Media : A comparative study of Japan, Korea, and Finland

In order to examine how the same types of social media are perceived and utilized in different national contexts for journalism and news media, we studied mainstream newspapers in three countries where both newspapers and social media are viable: Japan, Korea, and Finland. Our in-depth interviews with journalists indicate both similarities and differences in the three countries. The most outstanding similarity is that newspapers have not fully incorporated cross-level communications available on social media platforms. Factors related to organizational structures, goals, policies, and procedures served as filters for the incorporation of social media into the news production and distributio…