2005 Annual Report - Online Content Analysis

How much original reporting occurs online?

The data continue to suggest that Internet journalism, at least on the major news sites studied, is still largely second-hand material, usually from the old media.

The fact that little has changed in the last year may be a sign that less progress is being made on the content side of the Internet than on the economic side.

While the sample last year was slightly different,¹ and some of the sites have changed (ABCNews.com replaced CBS.com), we can still observe some patterns.

The amount of effort put into updating or modifying wire copy with some original work has declined. The percentage of stories that were a combination of staff and wire dropped to just 9% from 23% a year earlier.

And the percentage of wire-service stories posted without any sign of editing rose, to 58% this year from 42% a year earlier.

Meanwhile, the percentage of original work remained the same as a year earlier (32% of all stories were bylined staff-written). And that original work was even more limited than before to just a few sites.

In other words, despite the migration of audience to the Web, there is no overall sign, at least at the sites studied, of any surge in originality of content. That seems to be reinforced by evidence of staff cutbacks and even more limited resources we found in examining News Investment.

Story Orignination, 2004
Percent of All Stories

Origin	Total	AOL	ABC	CNN	Dall-as	Fox	Bloom.	MSNBC	WPost	Yahoo
Staff	32%	1%	25%	54%	12%	14%	96%	13%	83%	1%
Wire & Staff	9	0	1	15	14	24	1	24	2	0
Wire	58	98	74	30	73	62	4	63	15	99
Other Org.	1	2	0	1	0	0	0	0	0	0
Totals may not equal 100 because of rounding.

Could the rise in wire copy be just a sign of our sample's changing? The evidence suggests it is more than that. Much of the change occurred on the five sites that we studied both this year and last.

That was particularly true at the three cable sites studied. At CNN, for instance, the percentage of wire copy doubled, from 15% to 30%, while original work dropped from 75% a year earlier to 54% this year. CNN, however, is still clearly head and shoulders above the other cable sites in the percentage of original reporting.

We saw similar changes at MSNBC. The amount of straight wire copy rose from 23% to 63%, while the percentage of stories in which MSNBC's staff made some attempt to customize or add to the wires fell by half, from 48% to 24%. Original stories fell from 17% to 13%.

Fox News changed the least. Its slight rise in wire copy was not statistically significant.

Sites still vary greatly, but one change from a year earlier is that the nature of the parent company's original medium seems to be more tied, not less, to the kind of site it produces. Most notably, the two newspaper sites far outweigh the others in original reporting. Fully 96% of the Bloomington site, www.pantagraph.com, is original, suggesting a decision to stay local rather than carry wire or other more national stories. And 83% of the lead stories at Washingtonpost.com were original.

Broadcast-based sites, on the other hand, range from 54% original content on CNN to just 13% on MSNBC. And the local television site's approach is quite different from that of the local newspaper. Just 12% of the content on cbs11tv.com is original reporting, with 73% wire.

A year earlier, we found that news sites fell into one of these three categories in producing lead stories on their front pages:

• Sites that were primarily staff-written or performed their own verification and reporting.

• Sites that customized wires and produced some original content.

• Sites that relied almost entirely on wire stories without rewrite or much editing. Such sites are really more portals than news organizations.

What appeared to be happening in 2004 was that the middle category was shrinking. The nine sites studied ran either their own stories or straight wire copy, with little editing of outside content. The lone exception was CNN, in which half the copy was original and most of the rest wire.

As was the case in 2003, the two aggregators, AOL and Yahoo, made no attempt to produce their own work on their lead breaking stories.

Does it matter where a site's news comes from? The risk of relying predominantly on wire copy is that it means entrusting the accuracy of the copy to someone else. You have made no attempt to verify independently. The growing tendency this year to run wire without any kind of staff input or editing suggests even greater risk.

On the other hand, if we analyze the depth of reporting, particularly the sourcing, of the wire copy and the original copy, the data suggest little difference between them. Wire and staff copy had nearly equal levels of transparency of sources, range of viewpoints and number of stakeholders - all of which were quite high.

The issue, then, may be more a matter of repetitiveness. Many outlets end up carrying the same stories. The amount of original reporting is not growing. Attempts to do some editing and checking of wire copy are declining. If a story does prove erroneous, then, the spread of the error will be all the greater.