2004 Annual Report - Online Content Analysis

One question about the Internet is how long stories can be. On one hand, the Internet has the potential for infinite depth. On the other, some people question whether users can absorb long stories onscreen.

Is there an optimal length? Do sites vary much when it comes to this question?

Overall, the lead stories on the Web were shorter than newspaper front-page articles and than print magazine cover pieces. Internet lead stories were generally between 500 and 1,000 words (54 percent) while newspaper front page articles tended to run to more than 1,000 words (54 percent of front page articles) as did magazine cover stories (42 percent).

There seems to be no accepted norm among the sites studied when it comes to length of lead stories. Moreover, the differences did not seem to be tied to their originating news medium. At MSNBC.com, for instance, nearly half of all of stories were more than 1,000 words.

Some sites broke up long stories by dividing them into multiple pages. In the middle of the story, then, users must click the "next" button again and again to read on. Thus, while space is indeed unlimited, the amount of work the user has to do can often increase with length.

Sites also varied widely in how many short stories they carried. AOL and Fox ran a lot of short stories, under 500 words - nearly a third of those at AOL (31 percent) and more than a quarter at Fox (28 percent). At CBSNews.com, meanwhile, only 18 percent were that short.

Story Length, By Site
Percent of Stories, By Words

Site	101-500	501-1000	1001+
AOL	31%	56	14
CBS News	18	75	7
CNN	17	59	25
Fox	28	45	26
LVRJ	6%	53	40
MSNBC	14%	38	47
NYTimes	19%	43	38
Yahoo	13%	57	30

Totals may not equal 100 due to rounding.

Sourcing

In general, 39 percent of the 709 stories studied on the Internet contained anonymous sourcing, roughly double that of weekly news magazines, and more than newspapers overall, but less than newspaper front pages (45 percent of front-page articles had anonymous sources).

Six in ten stories (59 percent) had the highest level of source transparency - at least four sources named with some attempt to describe the source's potential biases or point of view.

At least in lead stories, sourcing seems pretty strong. It is important to note that much of this sourcing arrives second hand, from wire services and, as mentioned above, much has not been verified by the Web site itself. Still, some of the wire copy seems the best sourced of all. MSNBC.com, for instance, which relies heavily on edited wire copy, was the most likely to run stories with four or more fully identified sources (71 percent of stories). CNN, with more original reporting, was the least likely to run stories with this highest of level of fully identified sources (45 percent).