Online Content, A Day in the Life - Annual Report 2006

As the name implies, JSOnline represents the effort to create a news experience for users online distinct from what they find in print but related to it, all with the resources of a paper with a circulation of 240,000 on weekdays and 430,000 on Sundays.

That morning’s Milwaukee Journal Sentinel was augmented on the Web with a clear section signaling to users new breaking news in a self-described “Weblog,” plus a menu that broke down the news by city, links to online chats, staff blogs, reader photo galleries, and even ways to get RSS (a web feed format), and a link so that people could easily submit news tips.

JSOnline.com Lead Stories

Some of what follows, particularly the generous offering of staff-written blogs, is an update from how the site looked on May 11, 2005, but the general philosophy was already there.

The emphasis on JSOnline is not simply to update a given morning’s paper — to deliver the newspaper in real time. The Journal Sentinel seems to be approaching the task as if the Internet is a different medium, rapidly developing a different personality that goes beyond the capacity for real-time immediacy.

The Journal Sentinel, on May 11, was trying to exploit the possibilities of the Web as much as any site we found, and in some ways more than the online-only sites Google and Yahoo. The difference was the ability to offer original content and the fact that the paper clearly was connected closely to a community.

JSOnline at 9 a.m. that day looked a good deal like the morning paper, leading with a local election-fraud story in the right margin, a controversy over changing the name of the Marquette sports teams and a story on a local male student suspended for wearing a dress to his high school prom. As the day wore on, the site added “DayWatch, a Weblog of today’s developing news” — local home-sales figures, a legislative battle over taxes, and testimony in a local trial — in a box sitting atop the site’s top story. “DayWatch” is not strictly a blog in the typical sense. Rather, the paper is posting the first few paragraphs of stories that seem likely to appear in the following day’s paper. Rather than filling the page with new developing headlines, however, the new postings are strung together on one page in chronological order. As the day goes on, “DayWatch” grows. Updates are posted as new material, not changes in existing stories, the same feel as one gets from personal blogs.

Other changes on the site during the day were sparse, though at 5 p.m. the lead story was also new, as the Marquette name controversy had taken a new turn. The “Warriors,” who had seen their name changed to “Golden Eagles,” were again finding their nomenclature being reconsidered. The Marquette story bumped the election-fraud story into the right margin.

Below “DayWatch” users find the main stories from that morning’s paper unchanged. Under those come wire stories from around the nation and world that are updated throughout the day.

Down the left side, the news is offered not first by sections but by cities and towns — Milwaukee, Waukesha, Washington, Ozaukee, Racine. Here the stories are listed not just from this day but earlier days as well. Again, immediacy is not the only value here; localism is important, too. Under sports, the next header, users again can navigate directly where they want — Packers, Bucks, Brewers, Marquette, etc.

By the numbers, JSOnline was not particularly focused on multimedia. Only about 2 of its top 10 stories featured video, less than any site other than Google. No story on May 11 featured a photo gallery or audio. But the site was among the leaders in stories that allowed users to manipulate and customize information.

And every top story invited readers to communicate and ask questions — the only site to reach that level. Each story also included the e-mail address of the reporter — click and you are sending a message.

Since we studied the site, it has expanded its Web offerings. “DayWatch” averages somewhere around 20 posts a day, and the site added “FirstWatch,” a blog entry that offers readers a conversational preview of that day’s news. JSOnline has also begun investing more in multimedia, adding more audio slideshows, video and interactive packages.

The sense one gets, generally, is of a site that by design is trying to explore not certain aspects of what the Web may offer but, within the range of a paper in a medium-sized city, as many of them as they can think of.