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Study: Political news sites less useful

Buy Generic Viagra Online Cheap, Costco Viagra Cialis ^^ Buy Cheap Online Sildenafil"ePolitics 2004: A Study of the Presidential Campaign on the Internet." The study compares coverage of the current campaign to findings from its 2000 study, when the Project reported heavy use of wire copy and a fair number of links to outside sources, along with a poor sense sense of the candidates conveyed on most sites.

This year's study's findings were even more discouraging. The study of 10 major sites found that the sites are providing less useful information than they did four years ago -- including less original reporting and fewer links to external sites than in 2000.

The key findings include:

Users were even less likely to find original reporting online this year than in 2000. More than a third of front-page stories online (37%) were wire copy from secondary sources, up from 25% in 2000. Much of that so-called original content, moreover, involved modifying wire copy rather than being original bylined stories.

As was true four years ago, going into and out of primary contests at least, users would be hard pressed to find a lead story that dealt with anything other than the latest back and forth among candidates, or the horse race.

Seven of the ten sites offered background links to candidates' policy positions. Four years ago, only half the sites studied contained such links.

Interactivity is still not a big component of online political front pages. Four of the 10 sites studied offered no interactivity at all, and those that did offered less of it than four years ago.

The number of links to external web sites also has diminished. Seven of the ten sites studied offered no links to other sites or to other news organizations.

Sites are turning more this year to "customizable" information, allowing users to manipulate data by matching themselves to a candidate or searching information about a particular state.

Some of the conclusions are a bit too generalized because of the way they were analyzed -- for example, the study observes a "stepping back from the kind of interactivity seen four years ago" based on the smaller number of links to interactive components on political fronts. The interactive features may not be organized on the fronts in the same way, but there's no question that most, if not all, of the sites surveyed are producing more interactive features than four years ago -- and more advanced ones. It would have been nice to see those interactive features more closely analyzed.

Still, the study points out a lot of interesting -- and disappointing -- conclusions.

And as the study itself says, numbers only tell part of the story. "A page's personality and depth-what you get from all those links and stories-can't be captured in a strictly quantitative analysis." So make sure to check out the 10 in-depth site profiles, which are perhaps the most enlightening part of the study.

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