Interactive Features and Newspaper Websites: A 2007 Content Analysis of Daily Newspapers
Dr. Robert Bergland
Lisa Crawford
Sarah Noe
Melody Ellsworth
Missouri Western State University
Much has changed with the online newspaper scene in the decade since Peng, Tham and Xiaoming’s 1997 survey of 247 publishers and content analysis of 80 newspaper websites. But, while there has been some research–most notably, the Bivings Group’s 2006 report on the features of the websites of the 100 newspapers with the largest circulations–there has not been a comprehensive look at the entire gamut of daily newspaper websites. Much of the literature has focused on internet coverage of an issue (Dimitrova and Neznanski 2006, Jha 2007), single convergent elements, such as nonlinear storytelling (Massey 2004), or has been a more ethnographic study of a single website (Huang et al 2004) or a small number of websites and newsrooms (Li 1998). Other newspaper studies have focused on surveys (Murley 2007) instead of a detailed content analysis of what newspapers are actually doing on their websites.
To provide a more detailed and thorough picture of the current state of daily newspaper websites, we randomly selected 361 U.S. newspapers from the 1,437 listed in the 2007 Editor and Publisher Yearbook, enough to achieve a 95 % confidence rating an error margin of +/- 5%. Our research team looked for the presence of 24 features, including 11 interactive features: interactive graphics, reader polls, reporter/editor blogs, reader blogs, forums, reader comments, links to internal/related articles, links to external sites, emailing articles, emailing reporters and letter-to-the-editor links.
Our presentation will outline the key findings from that content analysis of interactive features, including the impact of demographic factors such a size and free and paid subscription vs. nonsubscription sites. Some of the most noteworthy findings include the following:
• Links for readers to email articles to others (76%) and to email reporters (51%) were the most common interactive features on the newspaper websites
• While 80 of the top 100 websites in the 2006 Bivings Group study had reporter blogs, only 25% of the overall daily newspaper websites in our study had blogs
• Also in surprising contrast to the Bivings Group report, which found only 19% had reader capability to comment on articles, 42 percent in our study had such capability.
• Only 5% of the websites used interactive graphics (typically clickable Flash graphics) to supplement their news content
• Despite the relative simplicity of including hypertext links in the body of a news story, few newspaper websites had articles with links to related stories on their own websites (7%) or to other websites (6%)