ASSESSMENT OF AUDIENCE AWARENESS, ACCESSIBILITY AND PATRONAGE OF ONLINE NEWS

CHAPTER ONE
INTRODUCTION
The growing number of internet users is one of the factors responsible for media convergence i.e reading, viewing and watching news online practicable. For instance, the number of internet users in Nigeria has further increased to 93.4 million, according to a new report on Internet status in the country. The report obtained by the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC), the telecoms industry regulator, indicated the country has recorded about 14 per cent growth in mobile internet subscriptions between January and end of July 2015. According to the data, which shows that Nigeria’s mobile Internet ecosystem is gaining momentum, telecoms networks collectively boosted mobile Internet subscriptions on their networks from 81.8 million in January to 93.4 million in July (Kunle, 2015). Meanwhile, newspaper can be seen as a set of large printed sheets of paper containing news, articles, advertisement etc. and published every day or every week and become stale the next day when new copy emerged. In relation to the above definition, it could be safely said that online news are the publications of print media (Newspapers) that are made available on the internet which can be easily passed across the world. Sometimes, it a post of fact, figure and opinions on blog and social media about issues of public interest. Adeniran, (2015).  Today, almost all media organisaions are now migrated online to post the softcopy of their hard copy news with lots of traffics and adverts, it helps them to reduce cost of production and circulation and helps in competing with broadcast media as they can update it every minute as news breaks while it also offers them the opportunity to reedit their copy after publishing which can never be possible in hardcopy. As a result of this development, lots of undergraduates and unemployed graduates have turn online news into business by creating their blogs, website and groups on social media platform, in fact this phenomena has made almost everybody a journalist called citizen journalist. Similarly, one of the common activities on the internet is news reading or watching either on newspaper websites or through bloggers including watching live and podcast news video on video-tube/ vloggers (video bloggers) on their computer, Smartphone and some other GPRS enable phones. In a recent research conducted by Laittos Multimedia and Research Institute-LMRI(2015) revealed that one of the reasons for online news popularity is because it is cheap and convenient comparing to purchase of a copy of newspaper everyday at N200 which become stale after some minute as new events breaks every hours (LMRI, 2015).  It is against this background that the research assesses audience awareness, accessibility and patronage of online newspapers with a study of students of University of Abuja