Global warming causes different natural disasters which becomes a nightmare for every country worldwide. Taiwan, locating in subtropical area, is threatened by typhoon and flood every year. So the study focuses especially on how to use media power to communicate instant and useful news of precaution against nature calamities to public.
The study aims at the correlation between the characters of disaster information and audience effect. The study is based on the Media Dependency Theory of Ball-Rokeach and DeFleur in 1976, which states: audiences depend on media in different ways and will be affected by individual, group and culture differences. Audiences have motivation to understand themselves and outside environment, and to interact with others. Media is the bridge to fit their demand.
The improvement of new technologies brings more alternative media and makes audiences’ demands and preferences more variable. Audiences can easily reach the information and contents they want and depend more on media than ever. According to the media dependency theory, information characters can be divided into “quantity” “profession” “multiplicity” and “dependency.”
The study surveyed subjects by using online questionnaire and tried to find out the differences between information characters, discussed the usability of disaster news reporting in Taiwan and analyzed the relationship between population variation, media using habit and media dependency.
