This research examines the ways how the Indonesian social media users apply the new media to consume news. They are no longer spending much time to retrieve news on traditional media and turn into various new media instead. Social media as a subset of online new media form is about the main tool to grab news. In fact, with the characteristics of social media that potentially limit news consumption activities such as words limitation and the issue of credibility as well as accuracy, people remain keenly grabbing news from social media.
So it is significant to understand why people consume news via this new online space. The rising digital and mobile devices are so far considered the reasons for which the news consumption shifted turning into social media. This research is expected to find out other considerations for the Indonesian social media users as the respondents. The approaches of respondents for retrieving news through social media, especially on mobile devices are elaborated in order to obtain obvious records for news consumption activities.
Having gone through the above Literature review, the research can be driven to know further about (1) How do respondents consume news on social media? ; (2) How do respondents evaluate news consumption on social media? ; (3) How do mobile devices influence respondents in retrieving news from social media?
Those research questions then were answered by gathering empirical data from Focus Group Discussion (FGD). FGD is chosen as the method to collect information from Indonesian social media users to answer the research questions. This study’s finding is that major respondent click hyperlink to retrieve news on social media. The features which are owned by social media, such as Hyperlink, Re-tweet, and Hashtags lead them for having more news consumption behaviour. Furthermore, respondents also perceived social media as a news media. This activity implies they are no longer depending on journalists or mainstream news media to retrieve news.
Moreover, the study discovered that mobile device as Affordance application to retrieve news from social media. The empirical data shows that the shift of mobile news behaviour is applied positively by respondents. Mobile devices play significant roles for improving news consumption on social media.
