Communicating Digital Disruption by An Online Newspaper in Thailand

Abstract

This study investigates how digital disruption is communicated to the public by the Thailand’s leading English newspaper, The Bangkok Post Online Newspaper. Informed by Carreon and Piyamat (2018), 292 news articles that were reported from 1 January 2010 to 31 December 2018 composed of 245,296 words were examined for keywords (Scott, 1997) employing a mixed method analysis, using the free corpus tool AntConc 3.5.7 (Anthony, 2018). The investigation was run by comparing words with high absolute frequencies against their frequencies in the British National Corpus (BNC) using log-likelihood (see Rayson & Garside, 2000 for details of log-likelihood uses). Any words with log-likelihood (LL) values greater than 100 were considered keywords. The resulting keywords were iteratively thematized (e.g. Krippendorff, 2013) by each of the researcher, and the degree of inter-rater agreement for accuracy and reliability in categorization is expressed as Cohen’s kappa value. The analysis yielded 81 keywords composed of six themes of words relating to: (1) business and monetary issues (N=27; 33.33%), (2) digital facilities and channels (N=19; 23.46%), 3) stakeholders (N=12; 14.81%), 4) digital disruption indicators (N=11; 13.58%), (5) time and location (N=8; 9.88%), and (6) informational dimension of language (N=4; 4.94%), with the analysts’ categorization having an almost perfect level of inter-rater agreement (Cohen’s kappa= 0.84).