Newspaper Content, A Day in the Life

If newspapers offer something audiences could not get from television, what about online? How much of what was in the paper the next morning was on Web sites the day before, or even the night before?

The answer varies. The national news Web sites appear to be moving faster than the local. And some local are moving faster than others.

In Milwaukee, for instance the bulk of the stories on the Journal Sentinel’s Web site as of 9 p.m. May 11 were the stories from that morning’s papers — not what would be in the next day’s papers or what had happened during the day.

The paper did have a feature at the top of the page, called DayWatch, in which reporters file brief accounts of stories they are working on for tomorrow’s paper. Those filings give a crisp sense of what had happened on some major stories of the day, particularly breaking news. But readers the next morning got a much fuller account of the news.

On May 11, for instance, the top DayWatch item as of 9 p.m. , which had been posted at 4:29 , reported that Gov. Jim Doyle of Wisconsin and leaders of the Republican-controlled legislature were working on a deal for minimum-wage legislation. In the paper the next morning, readers learned that the deal was done and that workers would see the bump in their paychecks starting June 1, with significant details put together by three reporters, working in both Madison and Milwaukee .

But in Houston , the Chronicle posted online nearly full accounts of stories that would appear in the next day’s paper as they became available, with time stamps of when they were posted. Online readers get more — though not all — of the newspaper the evening before, and many of the evolving elements even earlier.

Local TV station Web sites in Houston, incidentally, do the same, with rough text accounts of breaking news, plus video and audio, and time stamps of not just when stories were posted but when they were updated.