2004 Annual Report - Online Content Analysis

The promise of Internet news is its availability, immediacy, interactivity and unlimited space. Which of these characteristics are really being taken advantage of?

To get an answer, the study conducted a content analysis of eight news Web sites, including the five most popular as measured by ratings. This content study suggests that the Internet has made marked progress in the last few years, but the degree to which it is fulfilling its potential varies widely.

Among the findings:

• Internet journalism is still largely material from old media rather than something original.

• There is a mixed message when it comes to immediacy. While a good many of the lead stories are new through the course of the day (roughly half), the amount of updating of running stories with substantive new information is more limited (a little more than one in ten stories).

• For now, perhaps the strongest trait the Internet is taking advantage of is providing background information to its stories, such as links to archival material or other sources.

• Content on the web is still driven by text narratives. Most sites make only limited use of the multi-media potential of embedding such things as videos, audio, still photos and user feedback into news stories.

• Among those studied, there are three kinds of sites - those generating staff content, usually from their parent company, those relying almost entirely on wire service and those trying to edit and adapt wire copy and adding some original content.

To examine the Internet, the Project looked at a range of Web sites throughout each day, rather than look at sites once a day. We looked at eight sites - two from cable television (CNN and Fox), two associated with broadcast television networks (CBS News News and MSNBC.com, which is affiliated with both MSNBC cable news and NBC), two Internet-only sites (Yahoo and AOL) and two newspaper sites (NYTimes.com for a large- circulation market and reviewjournal.com of The Las Vegas Review Journal for a small-market newspaper). Altogether, 709 news articles were examined in four downloads a day on the eight sites over five days scattered over four months, or a total of 160 downloads. The study examined all articles on the front page tied to a graphic image, plus the next top three articles. It also noted the links within each article.

Perhaps most distinctive were the differences among the outlets. While many critics complain that television network news all looks alike, that local television news is identical from city to city, or that basics of newspaper writing differ little from paper to paper, that is not the case for Internet. A series of visits to the Internet sites studied revealed an assortment of different styles and approaches.

CNN's busy home page, for instance, typically features links to about 50 articles, plus content from sister organizations Time, Sports Illustrated and Fortune. The New York Times Web site typically has even more articles, 75 to 80, most of them staff written, yet little video. Yahoo, on the other hand, normally features just 20 articles. All of these articles are from wire services, but several include streaming video.

Whether this variety reflects a medium still trying to find a single successful model, or a medium by its nature likely to continue to sustain more variety than the old media is impossible yet to discern.