2004 Annual Report - Online Content Analysis

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

The study wanted to determine how much new information news Web sites actually posted through the day. To do so, we checked every four hours to see what percent of the lead stories were altogether new, what percent were unchanged and what percent were in some way updated.²

There are, moreover, degrees of updating: Was there something substantively new to the stories, just some minor details added or was it a rewrite around a new angle?³

Story Freshness

Percent of All Stories

Fresheness	All Stories
Exact Repeat	21%
Repeat: No New Substance	14
Repeat: New Angle	2
Repeat: New Substance	14
New Story	49

Totals may not equal 100 due to rounding.

Overall, half of all lead stories (49 percent) were thoroughly new through the course of the day. The figure drops even more if you discount the 9 a.m. stories, which were all coded as entirely new. For the remaining three visits each day, just 34% were entirely new.

Still, only 21 percent of lead stories were left unchanged.

The remaining 30 percent of lead stories involved some form of update of an existing story. Of these, however, only about half (or 14 percent overall) contained substantive new information. Another 14 percent involved just adding minor new details. And 2 percent were what journalists call a rewrite, the same basic story but rewritten around a new angle.

Looked at another way, about 63 percent of the stories on the Web sites studied were either altogether new or substantively updated through the course of the day.

Is there a 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 eight sites examined, which included the five most popular news sites on the Web, the Internet still follows the news flow of morning newspapers to a significant degree.

The morning generally opens (For this study, all downloads and references to time are Eastern) with new headlines and content. As the day wears on, new stories are less and less likely to appear. Indeed, the lowest percentage of new stories appeared between 5 p.m. and 9 p.m.

On the other hand, the number of stories that were substantively updated increased as the day wore on. Starting fresh at 9 a.m., 16 percent were updated by 1 p.m., 19 percent by 5 p.m. and 21 percent by9 p.m. Thus, somewhere between 9 p.m. and 9 a.m. is when the Internet converts to a new news cycle.

Are some sites more or less likely to add new content than others? Yes, but it does not correlate to what kind of site they are or the nature of their content.

Story Freshness, by Outlet

Percent of All Stories

Fresheness	AOL	CBS	CNN	Fox	LVRJ	MSNBC	NYT	Yahoo
Exact Repeat	23%	27%	10%	15%	70%	6%	25%	0%
Repeat: No New Substance	17	13	15	11	0	24	4	27
Repeat: New Angle	0	6	3	1	0	0	0	4
Repeat: New Substance	14	13	22	11	0	21	11	20
New Story	47	41	51	63	30	49	59	49

Totals may not equal 100 due to rounding.

Wire-heavy Yahoo and AOL, for instance, posted new stories less often than staff-driven NYTimes.com. Yet Foxnews.com, also mostly wire copy, was the most likely of the sites studied to post completely new material.

On the other hand, Fox was one of the least likely sites to offer substantive update stories in its leads. Its substantive updates matched that of the NYTimes.com, 11 percent, compared with more than 20 percent at cable-siblings CNN and MSNBC.

Does the web break stories? The study as constructed this year cannot answer that. It is something to watch in the future.