2005 Annual Report - Online Content Analysis

How far has online journalism come?

To what degree, in other words, are news sites delivering on the promise of the Internet - providing news with interactivity and multimedia capability, updating with new information, and delivering a different kind of journalism? Or is Internet journalism, at least at the mainstream news sites that get most of the traffic, a dumping ground for yesterday's copy and a place dominated by third-party wire copy?

To find answers, the Project conducted a content analysis of nine news Web sites, including the three most popular as measured by ratings.

Among the highlights:

• The extent to which sites are taking advantage of the Web varies dramatically, even among the most popular sites.

• Even at the best sites, the notion of a new form of journalism that takes advantage of the vast technology is not really accurate.

• Nonetheless, sites are exploiting the ability to continuously update more than they did a year earlier.

• Lead stories on the sites studied are better sourced and of broader scope than any other media studied, except for newspaper front-pages.

The Project looked at a range of Web sites throughout each day of our study, rather than just once a day. We looked at nine news sites - two from cable television (CNN and Fox), two associated with broadcast television networks (ABCNews.com and MSNBC.com, which is affiliated with both MSNBC cable news and NBC), two Internet-only sites (Yahoo and AOL) and two newspaper sites (Washingtonpost.com for a large- circulation market and www.pantagraph.com of the Bloomington, Illinois, Pantagraph for a small-market newspaper). Finally, we analyzed www.cbs11tv.com, the Website of Dallas CBS 11, a local television Web site.

Altogether, 1,903 news articles were sampled for twenty weekdays scattered between January and October. We rotated four different download times: 9 a.m., 1 p.m., 5 p.m. and 9 p.m., sampling one for each day. For five of the twenty days, we downloaded articles on each site for all four time periods. The study examined all articles on the front page tied to a graphic image, plus the next top three articles. It also noted the multimedia links within each article, specifically photo galleries, video, and graphics.