News sites: mostly repurposed
The new study on the State of the Media from The Project for Excellence in Journalism includes one of the largest analyses of online content ever done. 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 findings aren't that surpising, but they are interesting nonetheless.
The primary finding is that Internet journalism is still largely a medium made up of second-hand material, usually from the old media.
Overall, only about a third 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 were wire stories that included enough editing or additional material that they carried a combined staff/wire credit line or byline.
"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. Wed readers from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. were well-informed of attorney Lori Zocolo's inability to brush her teeth."
MULTIMEDIA
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. Three-quarters of stories contained links to archival or background information. A third of the stories contained at least one link to video; links to still photos or photo galleries; and/or links to other sites. Audio links, however, were almost nonexistent.
IMMEDIACY
The study also analyzed freshness and described the results as a "mixed message," but they seem pretty logical. About 63 percent of the stories on the Web sites studied were either altogether new or substantively updated through the course of the day. Considering many stories don't develop during the day, that seems a pretty good level of freshness.
Mar 18, 2004 | E-MAIL | SAVE | PRINT | PERMALINK | DISCUSS(0)
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