2005 Annual Report - Online Content Analysis

Like cable television news, the Internet offers the ability to continuously update users with the latest turn of events.

One goal of the study was to determine how much new information news Web sites actually posted through the day. To do so, for five of the days studied, we checked every four hours to see what percentage of the lead stories were altogether new, what percentage were unchanged and what percentage were in some way updated.

Moreover, there are degrees of updating: Was there something substantively new to the stories, were just some minor details added, or was it a rewrite around a new angle?

Story Freshness
Percent of All Stories

Freshness	All Stories
	2003	2004
Exact Repeat	21%	26%
Repeat: No New Substance	14	2
Repeat: New Angle	2	*
Repeat: New Substance	14	11
New Story	49	60
Totals may not equal 100 because of rounding.

What we found, generally, was a tendency toward posting more new stories and updating fewer running stories than a year earlier. This, too, may be a sign of sites adding new technology to process more copy, but then having less staff on hand to update major stories as new information becomes available. Machines, rather than journalists, may be defining the changing nature in online news at the moment.

The most striking change was that compared with a year earlier, the sites studied posted more new stories on completely different topics as the day wore on. This year, indeed, the majority of stories turned over (60%, up from 49% last year).²

Another quarter of the stories (26%) were left unchanged through the day, up slightly from 21% a year earlier.

Thus only 13% were stories that had some level of updating, half as many as a year earlier. There was one positive sign, however. The vast majority of those were adapted with substantive new information. That was markedly different from a year earlier, when it was just as likely that a story would be tweaked with only minor new details. So fewer stories were being updated, but of those few, more are being substantively or meaningfully updated than a year earlier.

Do the changes from year to year, particularly the rise in new stories, suggest that there is now a new news cycle on the Internet? And is the news updated continuously in an even flow? Or does it change sharply toward the end of the day, after the close of business but a good 10 or 12 hours before the morning newspaper arrives?

Based on the sites examined, which included the three most popular news sites on the Web, the Internet seems to have adopted more of a continuous news cycle than a year earlier.

Last year we found that the morning generally opens with new headlines and content. (For both years, all downloads and references to time are Eastern) As the day wears on, new stories are less and less likely to appear as leads. What sites did was update the original morning stories. The level of substantive updating increased as the day wore on.

That pattern no longer holds. Stories are still mostly new at 9 a.m. (and for the purposes of this study all are considered new). But now the sites studied are posting more new lead stories throughout the day. More than half of the 1 p.m. stories were new (55%) as were 48% of 5 P.M. stories and 42% of 9 p.m.

Story Freshness Throughout the Day