No abstract

Using the information from mass media, consumers develop their perceptions towards dairy products. This article examines how these perceptions are developed. Based on a mixed design, our research has three consecutive data collection phases. The first phase is a quantitative content analysis of four major Turkish newspapers, three popular Turkish television health shows and Turkish internet content on dairy products. Second phase is designed to collect qualitative data from three focus groups in order to reveal what kinds of perceptions are developed about milk, cheese and yogurt and how the consumers verbally express them. Findings from these two phases are used to develop a questionnaire, which is applied to a sample of 733 urban consumers, for the quantitative measurement of these perceptions. Findings reveal that mass media disseminates huge amount of information to which consumers are exposed. Consumers admit that their decisions were usually affected by such information. Survey results showed that dairy consumers tend to trust more in the positive claims than the negative ones. Consumers mostly develop perceptions regardless of their socio-demographic differences due to the mainstreaming effect of mass media. However, a cluster analysis showed that younger, more educated, wealthier and regular diary consumers have lower levels of negative perceptions about milk, cheese and yogurt. On the other hand, consumers with more trust in media and readiness to share media information have higher levels of positive perceptions about milk and yogurt.

ÖzAnahtar Kelimeler

Turkish journalism literature is fairly robust and dates as early as back to the 1960's. Although the number of refereed academic journals are limited, there are plenty of journal articles covering a variety of different aspects of journalism. This article investigates how Turkish journalism literature evolved through five selected academic journals. Our bibliometric analysis of 558 journal articles revealed that single author articles are common and articles mostly referred to Turkish sources. It is also found that methodologies are not clearly mentioned in the articles. However, we project that new generation of junior prolific academicians will improve the quality of Turkish journalism literature in the near future.

Gossip and rumour, as forms of informal communication in academic organization have attracted little research attention in the literature. This paper examines the perceptions of Turkish academics of gossip and rumours, gossip topics and their relationship with certain organizational cultural issues. A web-based questionnaire was sent to 356 academics working in the communications field. The findings revealed that gossip and rumours are quite common in academic organizations. Internal gossip and rumours are perceived to be more common than the external gossip and rumours. Gossips and rumours about the management and the personnel rights are among the top topics. On the other hand, academics generally have negative opinions about gossip and rumours. However, such negative opinions about gossip and rumours were found to decrease when the perceived organizational democracy and internal communication levels increase. It is clear that academic administrators may not cope with gossip and rumours successfully unless they improve democratic participation and internal communication.