Changing news formats in online newspapers and in the print media

Extended abstract, work in progress

Panu Uotila

Contact information: PhD student Panu Uotila University of Jyväskylä Department of Communication P.O. Box35 FI-40014 University of Jyväskylä FINLAND

[email protected]

Introduction The emergence of the Internet’s virtual communication space has challenged traditional journalism and journalistic work processes in many ways. By making online newspapers possible, the Internet has changed newspaper readers’ information consumption habits and behaviour, and as a consequence, has brought about dramatic declines in newspaper circulation in many technologically developed countries. The biggest impact of the Internet on journalism is the emergence of ‘online journalism’. The Internet is a versatile medium, which has the capability to combine the features of traditional media, radio, television and newspapers. The features that distinguish the Internet from all the other media are: almost limitless capacity to store news stories; rapid real time updating; largely varying length of stories; use of interactive graphic elements and direct quotation of voice or video. Specific features, such as multimediality, hypertextuality and interactivity make online journalism functionally different from print journalism. Furthermore, online journalism has influenced the ways print media present news. (cf. Paterson & Domingo 2008; Pavlik 2001; Prasad 2009; Quinn 2005; Royal 2008; Thurman & Lupton 2008 and van der Wurff & Lauf 2005.) The purpose of my PhD-study is to examine different methods of news presentation online compared to print media in three different countries: Finland, Great Britain and United States. The study scrutinizes two key dimensions: news values and the structure of the news stories by combining quantitative and qualitative content analysis.

Brief literature review Online news media have become a very significant part of social, economic, and cultural life in technologically advanced societies. Online news journalism is changing and developing rapidly, challenging contemporary research in online journalism and making it quickly outdated. Recent online journalism research areas can be outlined according to contextual matter (such as the history and market environment, analyses of the causes, dynamics, and consequences of innovation); changes in journalistic practice; professional and occupational matters and the role of the user as a content producer and its implications on the public sphere (Mitchelstein & Boczkowski 2009, 562-575). Four aspects of changes in journalistic practices have attracted the most attention of scholarly research of online news: modifications in editorial workflow, alterations in newsgathering practices, acceleration of temporal patterns of content production, and the convergence of print, broadcast, and online operations. Scholars have examined the organizational integration among print, broadcast, and online operations, usually under the rubric of convergence (Deuze 2007). A common empirical strategy in studying online journalism is a structural approach to the news websites. Another research strategy shifts from their structure to the actual content of the sites, usually comparing the print edition of a newspaper to its online version. (Domingo 2007, 95-100). Van der Wurff and Lauf (2005) coordinated a cross-national team

of researchers in 2003 which analysed the biggest newspapers’ websites in 16 European countries. One interesting result of the study was that 70% of online news coincided with the print newspaper stories at the time. Current study applies structural approach to the actual content of news websites.

Research questions and methodology The main research question of this study is: What are the main characteristic features, news values and story structures used in online news presentation compared to those used in print newspapers? Secondary research questions are: In which ways and to what extent online journalism is a kind of transformation of journalism in the ‘old’ media, conserning styles, genres and technical journalistic elements? Is it possible to detect certain innovative elements that have emerged in online journalism and if yes, what are they? The final aim of the study is to develop a model describing the transformation, convergence and intermediality of the content, news values and story structures in the print and online versions of newspapers. Convergence is here understood as a phenomenon in which news stories in different media use more and more the same journalistic material provided by the same journalists and same news organizations. Intermediality in this context means similarities, differences and allocation and interaction of journalistic content in different media formats. This study also explores the distinction between Finnish online and print news journalism compared to their counterparts in the United States and Great Britain.

The methodology involves several steps: 1) Examination of the research literature and collection of empirical material using the constructed week sampling method. Empirical material consists of print and online versions of the news in the Finnish newspapers Helsingin Sanomat, Aamulehti, Iltalehti and Ilta-Sanomat, and the U.S. International Herald Tribune and the British Guardian. Helsingin Sanomat and Aamulehti are the most significant and widespread broadsheet newspapers in Finland and Ilta-Sanomat and Iltalehti are the largest tabloid papers in Finland. The International Herald Tribune is the global edition of the New York Times. The International Herald Tribune and The Guardian are internationally significant developers and innovators of online journalism. The Guardians website, guardian.co.uk, is one of the highest-traffic English-language news websites. (Reid & Teixeira 2010) Empirical material is collected in seven weeks during the period 25 April – 5 June 2010. The news material is collected in week 16 on Sunday, in week 17 on Monday and so on. Online newspapers are saved two times a day: at ten o’clock a.m. and at six o’clock p.m. The online versions are compared to printed newspapers of the next day. The analysis contains the homepage of the online versions, the front page of printed newspapers and five main news stories in each outlet.

2) The quantitative content analysis is the main method of this study. Using quantitative analysis it is possible to describe typical features of contemporary online news story, like the structure, news values, length, pictures and number of technical journalistic elements. 3) Empirical material will be complemented by the expert interviews of ten online news producers and editors-in-chief. Qualitative interview is a valuable supplement to empirical journalistic material, for finding out the decision makers’ interpretations and opinions concerning the development of online news presentation and their visions of the future of it. 4) Compilation of the findings and exploration of the differences between Finnish online and print news journalism compared to their counterparts in the United States and in Great Britain. A part of this will be a discussion about possible innovations in the content and intermediality, which online news journalism and print news journalism will probably utilize in the future.

Results and discussion The study is currently in the stage of the analysis of the empiric material. The final analysis will contain the main characteristic features, news values and story structures used in online news presentation compared to the print versions of the news. It should be noted that the form of online news presentation continues to be in formation, especially in relation to the more established forms of its print counterpart. At the moment journalists are attempting to create new ways of online storytelling. My hypothesis is that online journalism and print journalism will have totally different formats in the future, like radio news journalism and television news journalism already do. In the future the tablet computers such as iPad will also have their own journalistic format, combining characteristic features from print and online media. Already today online journalism makes greater use of the ‘inverted pyramid’ structure combining it with hyperlinks. Online news topics are in general ‘softer’, but stories are more dramatized and try to influence on readers’ emotions even more than in the print media. Online news stories are typically not written for concentrated reading and the readers can easily chance between different online news websites. Search engine optimization affects headlines because journalists are trying to create best selling and most attractive headlines. To summarize, online news journalism is becoming more commercialized, more localized and softer, while at the same time opening up towards a more deliberative, and more opinion oriented approach to news. Commercialization leads online news presentation towards to the ‘tabloidization’: the news are presented in a more simplified, personalized and dramatized way and the most important news value is the attractiveness of the story.

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