| Summary: | The term media experience is seldom defined explicitly by
communication and media scholars. Most often, it refers to media use and
the feeling (such as enjoyment) resulted from the use. To fill this void, the
present study turns to presence studies which espouse the idea of being
there in mediated environment. As online news use involves a kind of
mediated experience, this study adopts the existing measure of presence to
determine the multiple dimensions of online news experience. A Principal
Component Analysis (PCA) was used to establish the dimensions of the
experience in this exploratory study. Four dimensions were extracted from
the analysis: para-social interaction, transportation, absorption and social
realism. The study found that online news users were experiencing beyond
ordinary description; they interacted with the news, absorbed in the
narrative world, and to certain extent felt that they were being transported
into such world and also experienced the realism that the news stories tend
to convey. Implications for understanding the experience in news media
use from presence perspective are discussed.
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