E-News Brand Trust: An Empirical Study on Selected Newspapers in Indonesia

Introduction

Various challenges faced by many competed companies such as Television company, radio company, newspapers company, magazines company, advertising agencies and other advertisers are now forced to redefine how they reach consumers and still relevant (Harden & Heyman, 2009). Some well-known brands, such as Tribune Co., New York Time, Tucson Citizen, Boston and many brands of newspaper in the USA were closed because they have no ability to fund their operations. This was because of the decline in sales circulation. Even some leading brands of daily newspapers distribute paper for free. To overcome this problem, some companies switch to digital or we call it as “e-news brands”.

At the level of competition and the sluggish industrial growth, it is necessary effort to increase consumer’s loyalty. To keep customers loyalty, some printed media brands create online versions of printed media. In Indonesia, some newspaper companies are competing to switch from printed to the digital version. For example, kompas.com, detik.com, koran.tempo.com, republika.co.id, and so on. Consumers are given the easiness in accessing digital newspapers, because we can access these digital newspapers through a desktop computer, laptop, and smart mobile phone. Therefore, consumers enjoy more flexibility in accessing it.

The use of internet media makes business more powerful (Simeon, 1999). The traditional business shortcomings are able to be solved by internet. By means of internet, buyers and sellers can transact interactively, directly and by real time. (Brynjolfsson & Smith, 2000; Butler & Peppard, 1998; Griffin & Krampf, 1998), furthermore, it is flexible, fast, inexpensive (Simeon, 1999), easy navigation (Holloway & Beatty, 2003, 2008), information speed (Kracher, Corritore, & Wiedenbeck, 2005). Although the use of internet has many strengths, however, there are several weaknesses of internet for instance Gommans, Krishnan, and Scheffold (2001) contend that the online environment basically cannot be touched, sensed, and cannot interact with the salesperson. Some researchers describe that the weaknesses of internet can be in the form of uncertainty about vendor behavior, hacker risk (McKnight, Choudhury, & Kacmar, 2002), monetery loss risk, privacy risk (Pavlou, 2003). The said shortcomings of internet need trustworthy relationship between consumers and producers, between sellers and buyers.

Previous researchers contend that trustworthy is a key success factor in the online market and on e-commerce. (Ha, 2004; McKnight, Choudhury, et al., 2002; Tanrikulu & Celilbatur, 2013). Failure in engaging trust relationship on online media causes consumers will be reluctant to adopt e-commerce.(Ribbink, van Riel, Liljander, & Streukens, 2004). Trustworthy develops long-term relationship (Morgan & Hunt, 1994), and company’s performance as well (Ha, 2004). Trustworthy is considered to develop online business community (Nolan, Brizland, & Macaulay, 2007), online retailer (Holloway & Beatty, 2003; Mukherjee & Nath, 2007), online purchasing (Tanrikulu & Celilbatur, 2013), online auctions (Nadler & Kros, 2010), online games (Gao, 2005) and so forth. Our research objective is to get to know an empirical study on selected online newspapers in Indonesia e-news brand trust.

Therefore, the purpose of this study is to investigate several questions as follows: