Dr. Fondevila, University Research Award
Dr. Joan Francesc Fondevila Gascón, director of the Cable Studies Center (CECABLE) and director of the Department of Communication Sciences at the Universitat Abat Oliba CEU (UAO CEU), has been awarded with the VII University Research Award of Regional Press (ACPC) and Vives Network of Universities for Research “L’ús de la tecnologia als diaris de l’ACPC: fórmules de millora de rendibilitat a través d’Internet”. Funding obtained is 3,000 euros.
Fondevila, principal investigator of the Research Group on Digital Journalism and Broadband, expressed “great joy, because the empirical analysis of the monetization of journalism formulas, and in particular the local and regional, is necessary to ensure the future of one of the main bases of social system stability”.
The call is addressed to PhD students, teachers and researchers of the Faculty of Communication Sciences of the scope of the Catalan area. The call is intended to address any topic related to the issue of local and regional press and payment paper, using the Internet as a priority.
The award is organized by Premsa Comarcal (Associació de la Premsa Comarcal i Local), under the patronage of La Caixa, the support of the Generalitat de Catalunya and the collaboration of Xarxa Vives d’Universitats. Research is original and based on current industry data, information collected from interviews, surveys or polls on a representative sample. Being a journalism research on proximity, local and regional press, is especially appreciated that the scope note territorial balance in obtaining the data.
Fondevila publicly presented the winning project for the Seventh Convention of Regional and Local Newspapers, the May 18, 2013 in Olot (Garrotxa), when the verdict was announced. The public presentation of the winning work will be fully completed in May 2014. “The research focuses on the intersection between journalism and telecommunications, the key in the Broadband Society, cloud journalism and social journalism commerce,” said Fondevila, who has published over fifty scientific indexed international papers. In fact, the Research Group on Digital Journalism and Broadband is a leading global scientific production in its subject matter.
Empirically, the research studies telecommunicative access type (triple play, quadruple play or quintuple play) by county publications, the use of computers, broadband, telecommunications operators used (main and back up), the average speed of the newspapers of the ACPC (upstream and downstream), the use of SLA, the CIR average and possible terms of trade. Also find out if the ACPC media revenue formulas arise as micropayments, social networks and blogs. “From all this, we extract proximity capacity offer readers the publications under study” concludes Fondevila.
