2004 Annual Report - Online Content Analysis

How much original reporting occurs online? Based on the eight sites studied, Internet journalism on the major news sites is still largely a medium made up of second-hand material, usually from the old media.

Overall, only about a third (32 percent) of the lead articles on the sites studied was material produced by the organization's own staff. And much of that came from a few of the sites, particularly those from newspapers, posting articles from their print parents. Thus even most of this material was not original to the Web.

A larger percentage of lead pieces, 42 percent, were wire stories posted without any editing and produced by other sources, particularly The Associated Press and Reuters.

A quarter (23 percent) were wire stories that included enough editing or additional material that they carried a combined staff/wire credit line or byline.

It should be noted, however, that much of the time those additions or editis were so minimal that they were difficult to detect when these versions were compared with the original wire stories.

Story Origination

Percent of All Stories

Origin	AOL	CBS News	CNN	FOX	LVRJ	MSNBC	NYT	Yahoo
Staff	0%	9%	75%	13%	78%	17%	72%	0%
Wire & Staff	0	82	11	35	0	48	0	0
Wire	100	9	15	53	22	23	25	98
Other Org.	0	0	0	0	0	13	3	2

Totals may not equal 100 due to rounding.

Still, at least users could tell that someone at the Web site had edited these stories and made some attempt to check the material or compare it to other wires. This is a significant distinction. It means that the journalistic function of synthesizing and verifying had occurred.

The reliance on wires also meant a fair amount of repetition among sites. When a big story hits, one is likely to come across the same story on any number of Web sites. On the day of the Midwest Black Out (August 15th), for example, a quote from a woman in Cleveland who was arriving to work in a T-Shirt and shorts without having brushed her teeth was carried on five of the eight sites we studied. Web readers from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. were well-informed of attorney Lori Zocolo's inability to brush her teeth.

But not all sites are just wires. Basically the news sites studied fell into three categories when it comes to lead stories:

• 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. These sites are really more portals than news organizations.

The type of medium sponsoring a site did not dictate where the site's stories came from. The only exception was the two newspaper sites, which matched closely in origin of information. CNN was the only other site that took on the look of a newspaper. At all three of these, more than 70 percent of the articles were staff written.

The sites most likely to customize wires were a network television news site, CBS.com, and MSNBC.com, which is a joint venture of Microsoft and NBC. The CBS News site was dominated by wire/staff combination stories (82 percent). MSNBC.com was more of a hybrid - 48 percent staff/wire combinations, 17 percent original material, and 36 percent straight wire or other news organization.

Finally three sites were largely straight wire copy. Two of these, AOL and Yahoo, were the two Internet-only sites. Sometimes referred to as portals, they relied entirely on straight wire stories without any evidence of checking their veracity.

The third, Foxnews.com, whose sister cable channel produces continuous original content on television, did some original reporting, though not much (13 percent). About a third of its stories were wire/staff combinations (35 percent), but the majority of its lead stories were straight wires (53 percent).

Story Length, Staff vs. Wire

Percent of All Stories

Words	Staff	Wire
100 or Under	0%	0%
101 to 500	12	27
501 to 1000	46	56
More than 1000	42	17

Totals may not equal 100 due to rounding.

It should be noted that the study did not include some of the well-known sites, such as Salon or Slate/MSN, that produce original Internet content. An earlier study by the Project of political coverage examined these sites and found that Salon mixed the sharp attitude and tone of the Internet with solid reporting. Slate, on the other hand, leavened its opinion journalism with summaries of the day's hottest political events in a kind of puckish tone, something like "Hotline for the Internet."¹ These sites, however, like blogs, are more analogous to elite journals of opinion in print. Their audiences are smaller than those studied here (except for the Las Vegas Review-Journal's), and their content is more essay and argument rather than breaking news, which is the focus of this audit.

Does it matter that the Web, on balance, is still more a medium for getting news via wire stories? This means the Web site is entrusting the accuracy of the copy to someone else, a wire service. In the past, this has proved detrimental as false information gets passed on downstream.

In addition to the issue of verification, other differences stand out in the study. The wire stories were shorter than staff-written pieces and were also somewhat less likely to be updated with important new facts.

On the other hand, Web sites were somewhat more likely to post new wire stories than they were staff-written pieces (55 percent of wire stories were new, versus 47 percent staff written).