Newspaper sites update infrequently

New research at the University of Texas at Austin shows that newspaper Web sites are still having trouble breaking out of the once-a-day publishing cycle. The study found that of 30 news sites monitored, only 12 updated their home pages frequently, and the rest made few or no changes during the day.

Not surprisingly, the preliminary findings show that the smaller a paper's circulation, the higher the likelihood for fewer updates in their homepages. Of the group of 12 newspapers with the most changes, eight came from the top 10 circulation papers, three from the middle 10, and one from the bottom 10. Overall, the top 10 newspapers in circulation accounted for most of the changes (56 percent) of the sample.

One of the more interesting, and saddening, details from the study is that most of the newspapers did not add many elements to the stories posted in their Web sites. Only 8.75 percent of the total, or 1,748, changes represented additional elements to news stories. Half of those cases (50.7 percent) were related stories, followed by video (18.3 percent), slide show (9.6 percent), audio (4.6 percent) and maps/charts (1.9 percent).

Jul 21, 2004 | E-MAIL | SAVE | PRINT | PERMALINK | DISCUSS(0)

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