Online business media of Ukraine: Forming a conceptual framework

Abstract

In the article, for the first time in the Ukrainian social communications research discourse, we propose the definition of the term “social and economic issues” in the practice of Ukraine’s online business media. We described in detail the scientific approach to the definition of the concepts “media issues” and “thematic specialization” in Ukrainian and foreign scientific discourse and proposed our own definitions of the concepts “issues” and “socio-economic topic” (SET) in the content of Ukrainian online business media, which consider the complex nature of these concepts. The main subject was the formation of the socio-economic topic in the content of online business media using the method of compositional structure modeling. The presented model should be tested and can be actively used by practitioners to work on complex socio-economic topics to bring them out of pure economics into the realm where we can solve urgent social issues and problems. This became possible after conducting a qualitative content analysis of online business media. This enabled us to determine the peculiarities of thematic guidelines’ choice and work with a complex synthetic socio-economic topic. The methodology proposed in this study includes theoretical substantiation of the concepts “subject-thematic orientation,” “social-economic topic,” “thematic orientations,” formation of an experimental sample of media messages that contain features of the socio-economic topic and criteria for their selection, qualitative content analysis of selected texts.