FROM PRODUCT TO SERVICE: THE DIFFUSION OF DYNAMIC CONTENT IN ONLINE NEWSPAPERS By Mark Tremmpie, Amy Schnitz Weiss, and Rosental Calmon Alves This stud}/ docunwtits a steady increase in dynamic journalism on the Web sites of twenty-four U.S. newspapers, including a sharp rise in 2006 of multimedia elements, particularly video. This trend was particularly apparent for newspapers in our sample with print circulation between W0,000 and 120,000. While traditional news categories are the most common source of dynamic content, the growth over time is coming from coverage of weather, sports, crime, and accidents. There also appears to be a rise in hourly updating of softer news.
All media industries are in a period of transition, but the growing pains are particularly acute for those in print journalism. The transihon from paper to electronic distribution has confronted the industry with three major areas of change. First, instead of the centuries-long practice of publishing daily or weekly, journalists are being asked to publish on a continuous basis. That alone presents a major issue for newsrooms to confront.' Second, the new medium presents opportunities that newspaper journalists are being asked to exploit: use of audio, video, and animated graphics. And third, the medium allows for greater activity and involvement by the reader and simultaneously allows the newspaper to monitor that activity, harness it, and respond to it. Each of these changes is considerable by itself; combined they are having a major impact on the mass communication process and, likely, on the content of that communication. This project began in 2003 to track news content in oniine U.S. newspapers with this premise: that the "news as a product" model of the twentieth century was giving way to the idea of news as a service. A printed newspaper can be defined as a closed, static package of news, information, and advertising, constructed in a typical industrial era line of production with a fixed periodicity or publication cycle. In the digital era, the newspaper faces the challenge of breaking that traditional line of production into a much more dynamic flux of continuous information delivered through different digital platforms, but mainly on its Web site. Instead of the closed, static product, newspapers have been evolving into an open, dynamic service that not only breaks the time Mark Tremayne is an assistant professor, Amy Schmitz Weiss is a doctoral candidate. f&MC Qmnie and Rosentat Calmon Atves is a professor and Knight Chair in Joumalism, all in the Vol.84.No.4 School of loitrnalism at the University of Texas ai Austin. Winter20O7 825-839
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paradigm of the twenty-four-hour news cycle, but also absorbs the multimedia dimension. This multi-year study aims to record and measure how much the Web editions of American dailies reflect their evolution from a static product on paper to a dynamic service online. The study presented here focuses on news content which is dynamic, defined by the American Heritage Dictionary as "characterized by continuous change, activity, or progress."' In the context of online joumalism and this particular study, dynamic content is content which changes hourby-hour on newspaper Web sites. These changes include the addition or subtraction of stories, the alteration of headlines, the changing or addition of photos, and other multimedia elements. Focusing on dynamic online content, as opposed to the static, provided two primary benefits. First, it narrowed the scope of what was going to be a major content analysis while allowing a test of how widespread (or diffused) dynamic content was becoming. Second, focusing on content that Web editors are spending their time adjusting throughout the day permits determination of the direction journalism on this new medium might be taking. One of those directions, according to a 2001 study by Singer, is toward a greater percentage of local news."" This study extends the approach of Singer to look at dynamic content specifically. Is it, too, moving in the direction of more local news and less national or international news? And what other variables are associated with dynamic content? These questions were examined with a longitudinal content analysis of twenty-four online U.S. newspapers, ranging from those with high print circulation editions like the New York Times to those with smaller print circulation editions like the Albuquerque journal, which involved the coding of 2,888 content changes.
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in a longitudinal analysis of online newspapers spanning seven years, Greer and Mensing found what they called "more of everything."•" Specifically, over time they found more news content, more multimedia elements, more interactivity, and more revenue-generating features. These changes were apparent at newspapers large and small, but there were some differences. By the end of their study in 2003, Greer and Mensing found that medium-sized operations had caught up to larger newspapers in amount of content, multimedia use, and interactivity. Smaller papers, while gaining, lagged behind on these measures. It is apparent from their data that innovations are most commonly seen first among the largest papers, then mid-sized operations, and finally among smaller dailies. The authors attribute the specific evolution of Web-based news to the ongoing interaction between news organizations and their audiences: "The sites are responding to the increased sophistication of online readers, providing more multimedia features, deeper content, and more frequent updates.""^ Deuze in 2003 characterized the changing patterns of interaction between readers and news content as the emergence of vwnitorial and dialogic journalism.'' Others share this view that the connection between communicator and receiver has tightened and, to a greater jouRNMJSM & Mrtss COMMUNICATION
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degree than before, the news product reflects the needs of the audience. If true, this is another indicator of a move toward a service rather than product model of joumalism. Joumalism as a Process, Lasica was one of the first to make the claim that online joumalism was a process not a product.^ This is most evident on collaborative "crowd sourced" creations but is increasingly true in more mainstream venues. The shift from a productbased journalism mindset to a service-oriented approach mirrors a broader trend in Western economies away from mass-production and toward more flexible production and service." In computer-based communication, the term service is increasingly common, from Internet service providers to programming techniques that emphasize "service-oriented architecture." The service that online newspapers provide ranges from traditional gatekeeping functions to nontraditional ones.'' A change in gatekeeping practices promoted by the nature of the Web and perhaps users' expectations has resulted in a more continuous news tlow. The Diffusion of Dynamic Journalism. In a critique of online journalism ten years ago, Lasica said newspapers were failing to take advantage of "one of the Internet's most compelling features: its immediacy."'" That year, one of the first examples of news breaking on the Web occurred when the Dallas Morning News broke the story of Timothy McVeigh's confession to the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing on its Web site, hours before the story went to print." On September 11, 2001, newspapers rushed to get breaking news posted online as Internet users at work flocked to the Web in such numbers that many sites crashed. By 2003 and the start of the war in Iraq, online newspapers were better prepared: "Across the board, top news sites excelled at immediacy, context and commentary, creating for themselves the challenge of presenting attractive and expandable pages.'"= By this time, online newspapers were capable of covering breaking news but that was still the exception rather than the rule. In a 2001 longitudinal study, Dibean and Garrison compared six online newspapers by the kind of Web technologies used. They found that video, audio, and news updates were infrequently used on the sites.'^ However, they did find that online newspapers made use of forums, related information, e-mail, and search engines. Arant and Anderson surveyed 203 online editors and found that only 49% said they occasionally published breaking news on their Web sites. They also found a connection between the frequency of updates and the size of the online staff and circulation size. The larger the staff and the circulation, the more updates were made to the site.'^ If dynamic content is adopted as an innovation by online newspapers, it would be reasonable to expect it to spread according to the diffusion pattem described by Rogers.'^ Although typically applied to individuals, the pattem can also be applied to corporations.'" The adoption process for an organization follows a different path than for an individual. The organization goes through two stages: initiation and implementation. During the iniHation stage, agenda setting and matching occurs. FROM PRODUCT ro SERVICE
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During this stage die need for an itmovation is identified and it is reviewed to see how it fits in the organization.'' For online newspapers and the innovation of dynamic content, it is unclear if the majority of the industry is in this phase or if it has moved on to the second phase: implementation. The implementation stage involves redefining, clarifying, and routinizing the innovation. Redefining occurs when the innovation is changed to fit the organization. The clarifying step is when the innovation is put into use and becomes clear to everyone in the organization. The innovation then becomes fully incorporated into the organization during the routinizing step.'*" If this stage is complete for the newspaper industry as a whole, we should find that even the smaller circulation dailies (100,000-120,000) have adopted dynamic journalism. This is by no means a certainty. A recent report on The State of the News Media 2007 by the Project for Excellence in Joumalism stated that "The online audience for news in particular has apparently flattened out, and that includes those who consume news online regularly."'^ If the innovation of immediacy is seen by adopters to have lost its relative advantage it can ultimately be rejected. Rogers said this sometimes occurs when those with pro-innovation bias pursue an innovation for reasons beyond its actual usefulness. It may also be a case that the innovation of immediacy has been fully accepted and may be the reason for its flattening out of its overall acceptance of its adoption.
Hypotheses If dynamism as a news value in the online newspaper business has completely diffused, then we would expect to find this pattern for operaand tions of varying sizes. Thus: _ Research Questions HI: Dynamic content in online newspapers will increase over time and this will be true for large, medium, and smaller newspapers. If the diffusion process is not complete then smaller newspapers and possibly those in medium-sized cities may not be following this pattem. Hyperlocal Joumalism. Because of the need for newspapers in the online environment to present information readers cannot get anywhere else, some have predicted a growing emphasis on local news or, as some are calling it, hyperlocal news.^ This prediction has some empirical support. Tn an analysis of six online newspapers in Colorado, Singer found the content to be significantly more local-focused than the print counterparts.^' The present study tracked three categories of proximity: local, national, or intemational. Local news was defined as stories based in the primary publishing market of the newspaper.^ National news was defined as stories about the United States more generally or stories based outside the primary publishitig market of the paper but within the United States. International news was defined as stories with a primary focus on action outside the United States. Thus:
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H2: Dynamic content in online newspapers will be increasingly local, and this will be true for large, medium, and smaller newspapers. Prior research has shown that Web editors' treatment of stories is not uniform and can vary by, among other things, the topic of the story.^^ In this study, topics were politics/government, military/war, business/economy, education, science, health, weather, entertainment, sports, crime, courts, accidents, religion, and other. These categories are a variation on the topics used by The Readership Institute for "Analyzing Newspaper Content."^* RQl: Is dynamic content associated with certain news topics? In addition to the topic of the story, stories were classified by news type. News Type was defined as hard or soft news. Using the definitions of Patterson," hard news was defined as breaking events, major issues, or big disruptions in the routine of daily life. Soft news stories were seasonal, timeless, practical, personality-centered, and "news you can use." A neutral category was used for stories judged to be between hard and soft or a mixture. RQ2: Is news type associated with dynamic content? Finally, the study examined use of multimedia elements by online newspapers. Multimedia Elements were defined as slide shows (including flash animations, presentation slides, photo galleries), maps and charts (including static images), audio, video, or related stories (including complete coverage links or additional stories), and other items such as blogs. In a study covering the years 1997 to 2003, Greer and Mensing found a steady increase in the use of multimedia elements in online newspapers.^* RQ3: Are multimedia elements associated with dynamic journalism? This study is a longitudinal content analysis of twenty-four U.S. online newspaper homepages during two-week periods in June and July of 2004, 2005, and 2006. The twenty-four newspapers were selected from the Editor & Publisher International Yearbook list of the Top 100"
Daily Newspapers by Circulation.^" Although this approach eliminated the smallest of online papers it still allowed variation in approach by circulation size (see Table 1). Web counterparts of eight^" of the largest circulation papers were selected (with print circulations between 400,000 and 2,000,000), eight were selected from the middle of the list (between 180,000 and 230,000), and eight came from among the final ten on the list (between 100,000 and 120,000). FROM PRODUCT TO SERVICE
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TABLE 1 The Online Newspaper Sample Medium
Large
Small
USA Today
Seattle Times
Wilmington Nexos Journal
Wall Street Journal
Buffalo News
Allentown Morning Call
New York Times
San Antonio Express News
Knoxville News-Sentinel
Lof An^^eles Times
Fort Worth Star-Telegram
Lexington Herald-Leader
Washington Post
Louisville Courier-journal
Albuquerijiii; journal
Chicago Tribune
Daily Oklahoman
Sarasota Herald-Tribune
Long Island Neivsday
Virginian-Pilot
Worcester Telegram-Gazette
Houston Chronicle
St. Paul Pioneer Press
Spokane Spokesman-Review
The content anaiysis examined overall changes (N=2,888) that occurred on the homepages of the twenty-four online newspapers. The homepages were tracked and analyzed on an hourly basis during the time period selected. The homepages were collected by a technology called infoMinder, which takes snapshots of Web pages at hourly intervals and e-mails the Web pages to the end user. The homepages tracked by InfoMinder were e-mailed with the changes highlighted so changes could easily be found. These pages were then compiled into a Web archive organized by newspaper publication, time, and date. A sample of pages from these ten days, two pages one hour apart for each of the twenty-four publications, covering morning, daytime, evening, and nighttime hours, were selected and used for the results described in this study. Data were first collected in the summer of 2003 but were discarded due to inconsistencies in the intervals between data collection. These technical issues were resolved in time for data collection in 2004. Coders accessed the homepages via the Web archive and then coded the changes via an online form. Coders reviewed two homepages at once. The homepage from one hour would be brought up on fhe screen and compared against another homepage from an hour later to compare the changes that occurred. Changes found were tracked using the online form, which connected to a database that would later hold all the results from the study. Coders were notified to look for changes on the homepages that were not highlighted to make sure no changes were missed. Coders were also given the task to give their observations on the overall changes made to the online newspaper site during the time analyzed. All areas of the homepage were tracked for changes except the navigational elements, masthead, advertisements, special features, and editorial items. The screen size from which these homepages were viewed was based on the average screen resolution of 800x600 pixels or 1,024x768 pixels using a computer monitor size of 15" or 17". Over the three years of the study, nine coders were used, including two of the authors. Coder reliability ranged from a low of .72 for news type to a high of .96 for unit, with an average of .87 (Scott's pi)- Although agreements of .80 or above
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FIGURE 1 Main Page Updates by Circulation and Year 100M-87.1 80-
M-71,1 sd=39,7
60-
sd=28^^^H
40-
M=38,3 .sd=3(l,3
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^^'Tiil
20M=7.9 ^ ^ ^
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,
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•• •
I
2004
•
2005 2006
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are preferable, only one variable was significantly below that mark. For this variable (news type) results should be treated tentatively.-^' The sampling procedure isolated 240 main page captures that Results InfoMinder compared to the previous hours' version and automatically highlighted changes,^' In a few cases there were no changes, but in most cases there were many, an average of about a dozen per page. In total, coders identified 2,888 content additions or changes, referred to below as "updates." HI, predicting that we would see a trend toward dynamic journalism, was tested by comparing mean changes across three years for the twenty-four publications using an ANOVA linear trend analysis. The online sites averaged 31.3 changes in 2004 (sd - 29.9), 36.2 in 2005 (sd = 34.9), and 52.7 in 2006 (sd = 41.6). The linear trend was statisHcally significant (Linear term F = 4.27, p = .042) and HI was supported, A similar analysis was performed for three subgroups (large, medium, and small papers, see Figure 1). Our smaller dailies averaged 7.9 changes in 2004 (sd = 10.6), 15.6 in 2005 (sd = 11.8), and 32.5 in 2006 (sd = 18.5) and a positive linear trend was also confirmed (Linear term F ^ 12.26, p ^ .002). Medium-sized dailies saw a rise in main page updating in 2006 (M = 38.5, sd = 30.3) but a decline from 2004 (M = 26.8, sd = 21.1) to 2005 (M = 22.1, sd = 14.1). The trend analysis was insigruficant (Linear term F = 1.06, p = .315). The largest dailies showed a steady rise in changes from 59.4 in 2004 (sd = 28.9) to 71.1 in 2005 (sd - 39.7) to 87.1 in 2006 (sd = 48.8), but the ANOVA analysis is not significant (Linear term f = 1.93, ;J^.179). Alternatively, aggregating all the changes for these large online newspapers and runFROM Pmoucr ro SERVICE
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FIGURE 2 Main Page Updates by Proximity
30-
Local
National
Internationa!
Proximity
ning a simple correlation with i/ear yields a strong association (r - 0.996, p = .028). The ANOVA trend analysis fails here because there is considerable variation among the large dailies in their frequency of updating over time. So the overall trend toward dynamic content is driven primarily by the eight smaller papers in our sample. H2, predicting that updates to news Web sites will increasingly focus on local news, was tested by examining the growth rates of local, national, and intemational content change on the twenty-four sites over the three-year period (see Figure 2). While all types of updates appear to increase over time, only local news was statistically significant by ANOVA trend analysis (Linear term F = 4.40, p = ,04) with yearly average changes of 13.4 in 2004 (sd = 13.2), 14.0 in 2005 (sd = 10.1), and 21.6 in 2006 (sd = 15.0). The rise in updates on national news items was not significant (Linear term F = 2.32, p = .132) with yearly average changes of 12.0 in 2004 (sd = 16.6), 17.6 in 2005 (sd = 21.3) and 21.8 in 2006 (sd - 27.1) and neither was the increase in intemational news updating (Linear term F = 1.22, p = .274) with yearly average changes of 7.0 in 2004 (sd - 10.5), 5.9 in 2005 (sd = 10.2), and 11.2 in 2006 (sd = 17.3). The results support H2; there is a significantly increasing focus on local dynamic content but not national or intemational, A similar analysis was performed separately on the data for small, medium, and large online dailies. For the smaller dailies, local news was found to be rising at a statistically significant rate (Linear term F = 11.85, p = .002) while national (Linear term F = 3.26, p = .085) and international news (Linear term F = 1,01, /' = .327) were not significant. For medium-sized dailies, local news was not found to be rising at a statistically significant rate (Linear term f = 2.95, p = .102) while national news was (Linear term F = 8,07, p = .010). Intemational news was not significant (Linear term F = .325, /' = .575).
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FIGURE 3 Main Page Updates hy Topic 500-
473
4(H1-
3(10 -
200-
100-
26
Topic
For the largest dailies, local news was not found to be rising at a statistically significant rate (Linear term F = .012,/' ^ .914). The same was true for national news (Linear term F = 1.44, p = .244) and international news (Linear term F = 1.75, p = .200). As with HI, it appears that the significant relationship between local news and dynamic content is driven by the smaller papers and not the medium and large dailies. RQl required an examination of the news topics most frequently involved when online newspapers are updated. In the sample, the most common update topic was the category "Government/Politics," followed by "Business/Economy" and "War/Military" (see Figure 3). The second part of this research question asks how the update topics change over time. The data were examined for each topic individually and showed that five had significant increases over the three years examined: sports (Linear term F ^ 6.207, p = .015), crime (Linear term F = 5.125, p = .027), accidents (Linear term F = 5.948, p - .017), weather (Linear term F ^ 6.354, p = .014), and miscellaneous (Linear term F = 37.805, p < .001). Several update topics showed declines over time including health, education, and science, but only the last one neared significance (Linear term F - 3.487, p - .066). FROM PRODUCT TO SERVICL
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FIGURE 4 Main Page Updates by News Type
30-
â&#x20AC;˘
^dSl 20-
H 2005
M=21.7 ÂŤ^'-9
^ ^ H
M=15.9
10- ^ ^ ^ 1
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^ H
2004
M=25 . ^ H
.
M-13 2
2006
M=6.\ M=6.6
^
^
^
^
I). Hard News
Neutral
Soft News
News Type
RQ2 asks what type of news, hard news or soft news, is the most commonly updated on newspaper Web sites and if trends over time can be discerned. A five-point scale was used to rate each story but later collapsed to three categories: hard, neutral, and soft. Updated stories are far more likely to be hard news (57%) than either neutral (21%) or soft news (22%). However, that may be changing. Hard news was consistent over the three years with mean updates of 22.8 (sd - 21.9), 21.7 (sd = 24.2) and finally 24.3 (sd = 22.9) and an insignificant linear trend (Linear term F = 27.00, p = .822). But, as Figure 4 shows, both the neutral and soft categories were rising during the period of our study. Neutral news rose from 2.5 mean updates in 2004 (sd = 3.5) to 8.0 changes in 2005 (sd - 9.2) to 15.9 changes in 2006 (sd = 12.0) for a statistically significant rise over time (Linear term F = 26.241, p < .001). Soft news rose from 6.1 changes in 2004 (sd = 6.9) to 6.6 changes in 2005 (sd = 6.3) to 15.2 in 2006 (sd = 13.3), also a statistically significant rise (Linear term F = 11.105, p=.001). RQ3 asks about the use of multimedia and interactive elements in updates to the main pages of online newspapers. As expected, the vast majority of updates involve changes to text, more than 85%; overall. The remainder is divided among photos, graphs and maps, and other multimedia and/or interactive elements. The most common multimedia update in the sample was the video story and the multimedia category as a whole rose sharply over the three years of the study from 1.5 mean changes in 2(K)4 (sd = 3.3) to 2.6 in 2005 (sd ^ 3.8) to 6.9 in 2006 (sd = 8.1). The trend was significant (Linear term F = 11.36, p = .001). Unlike other changes where the medium and large dailies showed insignificant growth during our study, for the use of multimedia, particularly video, the trend is driven primarily by the largest papers in our sample, particularly the Chicago Tribune, the New York Times, and the Walt Street Journal.
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The use of still photos remained relatively constant over the study period. Common topics for stand-atone video updates were, in order, sports, govemment/politics, courts, and war/military, For video as an added element for a predominantly text-based story, the most common topics were government/politics, courts, war/military, crime, and accidents. This study documents a steady increase in dynamic journalism on Discussion the main pages of twenty-four U.S. newspapers, including a sharp rise and in 2006 of multimedia elements, especially video. The findings are conConclusions sistent with those of eariier studies that have examined Web updating." The significant increase in dynamic content for the full sample is driven, however, primarily by the smaller papers in the sample. Only for those eight papers is the rise over three years statistically significant. It appears the Web sites for the larger dailies have reached a plateau; they were already doing significant updating in 2004 and had less room to grow compared to sites of smaller papers. The findings shed light on the diffusion of dynamic joumalism within the online newspaper industry, it would appear the larger papers were early adopters and helped generate the steep incline of the diffusion s-curve prior to the 2004-2006 period studied here. The smaller papers, however, are later adopters and were still migrating towards dynamic joumalism in the middle of this decade. It is important to note^ however, that some online papers in the sample bucked this trend and have yet to complete Rogers' implementation phase of diffusion. It is worth noting two other changes, because the increment from 2005 to 2006 is much more acute than when the comparison is between 2004 and 2006. It coincides with the intensification, in 2005, of the tendency of American newspapers to merge their print and online newsrooms, especially after the Nezo York Times made such an announcement in August of that year. In 2006, there was an increase in importance placed on video content in news organizations during this time, an increase similar to this study's increase in the number of video updates on the sites examined. The second hypothesis concerned the geographic focus of dynamic journalism. Based on prior research, we predicted that dynamic journalism would be increasingly local in focus. And while all categories {local, national, and international) of dynamic joumalism rose during the study period, the rate of increase was only statistically significant for local news. Again, it was the Web sites of the smaller papers that drove this overall result; those sites had a significant rise in local dynamic journalism while the medium and large dailies did not. The content analysis shows that as newspapers move to more constant updates on the Internet, traditional beats are still paramount: government/politics, business/economy, war/military, sports, and courts. However, the news categories that showed statistically significant growth from year to year were weather, sports, crime, accidents, and miscellaneous. These categories bear some similarity to the topics that FROM PRODUCT TO SERVICE
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tend to dominate local news in another medium characterized by immediacy: television." There is also evidence that softer news may be driving much ot" the increase in dynamic content. Stories coded as hard news showed little growth from year to year, but those coded neutral or soft showed sharp and statistically significant upswings. Limitations. First, the content analysis tracked only dynamic content, those stories that changed from hour to hour, and not the entire contents of the online newspapers. Results should be viewed with that in mind. Also, many papers in the sample underwent redesign during the period of our study. This resulted in sharp differences, in some cases, in the quantity of changes on pages from year to year. No adjustment was made for this in the analysis presented here because these changes occurred across the sample (.small, medium, and large dailies) and were not judged to have significantly altered overall results. Because we drew our sample from Editor & Publisher's Top 100, findings cannot be generalized to the smallest dailies. Importantly, any pattern observed in the presentation of news over time must be considered in the context of real-world events. For example, it is conceivable that a paper's dynamic journalism content could increase over a three-year period due simply to more "breaking news" occurring either locally, nationally, or internationally in successive years. This possibility was considered both during the design of the study and in analysis of the results. Because the sample included twenty-four papers that are geographically diverse and with varying circulation sizes, any observed rise in local dynamic content is unlikely to be attributable to realworld local events. National and international events, however, posed a more serious threat to the validity of the study, especially because the sampling scheme encompassed the same two-week period for the three years studied. An analysis of the results shows, though, that the observed overall rise in dynamic content was driven not by national or international news but by local news. And the dominant national stories (politics in 2004 and 2006) and international stories (war in Iraq) did not show significant increases for dynamic content. Future Studies. This is an ongoing study that has been conceived as a multi-year gauge of the frequency and the topics that change on newspapers' Web sites to document what is seen as a shift from the singular, static, product-oriented approach of twentieth-century print journalism toward a service-oriented approach in the twenty-first century. Dynamic content is part of that evolution. Another part, unexamined in this study, is the new relationship between reader and newspaper and between reader and reader. Evident across the years of this study was a growing voice for readers, even on the front pages of online newspapers. Much of this came in the forms of local blogs, a feature increasingly apparent on news Web sites. Interaction, debate, and social networking are becoming visible components of online news. The "service" that news sites increasingly provide, beyond the reporting that remains the primary mission, is the bringing together of citizens in a way different than last centuiy. Here the voices of readers are amplified and the reader-to-newspaper relationship 836
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is transactional (and not just financially). Further study in this area is needed. So far, the newspapers have evolved considerably from the shovehvare days of using the Internet as a simple distribution means for the traditional paper product. But it is not yet clear if the transformation from product into service will be successful. Future studies must look at the business side of this question: Can newspapers make money by moving to dynamic journalism? It is not a settled question by any means. Finally, while the medium itself may influence the message, the advice of Singer (echoing Bill Kovach) ten years ago still holds: "Journalists cannot be content to be taken along for a ride. The technology may only be a vehicle, but being able to drive it is mandatory if one is to have any say in where that vehicle is headed."*"
NOTES l.Jane Singer, "More Than Ink-stained Wretches: The Resocialization of Print Journalists in Converged Newsrooms," Journalism & Mass Communication Qmrtcrly 81 (winter 2004): 838-56. 2. See definition 2 in The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, 4th ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2004). 3. Jane Singer, "The Metro Wide Web: Changes in Newspapers' Gatekeeping Role Online," Journalism & Mass Comtnunication Quarterly 78 (spring 2001): 65-80. 4. Jennifer Greer and Donica Mensing, "The Evolution of Online Newspapers: A Longitudinal Content Analysis, 1997-2003," in Internet Newspapers: The Making of a Mainstream Medium, ed. Xigen Li (Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 2006). 5. Greer and Mensing, "The Evolution of Online Newspapers," 30. 6. Mark Deuze, "The Web and Its Journalisms: Considering the Consequences of Different Types of Newsmedia Online," New Media & Society 5 (October 2003): 203-30. 7. J.D. Lasica, "Blogs and Journalism Need Each Other," Nieman Reports (fall 2003): [Electronic version: http://www.nieman.harvard. edu / reports / 03-3NRfall / V57N3.pdf]. 8. Oksana Mont, "Clarifying the Concept of Product-Service System," Journal of Cleaner Production 10 (2002): 237-45. 9. Daniela Dimitrova, Colleen Connolly-Ahern, Andrew Paul Williams, Lynda Lee Kaid, and Amanda Reid, "Hyperlinking as Gatekeeping: Online Newspaper Coverage of the Execution of an American Terrorist," Journalism Studies 4 (2003): 401-14. 10. J.D. Lasica, "Time to Freshen Up Online Newspapers," Amcncan Jounwlism Review 48 (June 1997): [Electronic version: http://www.ajr. org / Artide.asp?id-17921. 11. Christopher Hanson, "The Dark Side of Online Scoops," Columbia Journalism Review, May/June 1997 [Electronic version: http:/ / ardiives.cjr.org/year/97/3/scoops.asp]. FROM PRODUCT TO SERVICE
12. Barb Palser, "Online Advances," American Journalism Review (May 2003): [Electronic version: http://www.ajr.org/Article,asp?id=2994]. 13. Wendy Dibean and Bruce Garrison "How Six Online Newspapers Use Web Technologies," Newspaper Research journal 22 (spring 2001); 7993. 14. David Arant and Janna Anderson, "Newspaper Online Editors Support Traditional Standards," Newspaper Research journal 22 (fall 2001): 57-69. 15. Everett Rogers, Communication Technology, The New Media in Society (New York, NY: The Free Press, 1986), 403. 16. Carolyn Lin, "An Interactive Communication Technology Adoption Model,"Communicatioti Theory 13 (2003): 345-65; Sylvia M, ChanOlmsted, "Issues in Media Management and Technology," in Handbook of Media Management and Economics, ed. A. Albarran, S. Chan-Olmsted, and M. Wirth (Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 2005): 251-73. 17. Rogers, Comniuiiicatiou Technology, The New Media in Society, 403. 18. Rogers, Communication Technology, The New Media in Society, 404. 19. "State of the News Media 2007," The Project for Excellence in Journalism, (2007) [Electronic version: http://www.stateofthenews media.org]. 20. Mark Tremayne, "Harnessing the Active Audience: Synthesizing Blog Research and Lessons for the Future of Media," in Blogging, Citizenship, and the Future of Media, ed. Mark Tremayne (New York: Routledge, 2007). 21. Singer, "The Metro Wide Web: Changes in Newspapers' Gatekeeping Role Online," 65-80. 22. By our definition, one paper in the sample, USA Today, had no local stories. 23. Mark Tremayne, "The Web of Context: Applying Network Theory to the Use of Hyperlinks in Journalism on the Web," Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly 81 (2004): 237-53. 24. Stacy Lynch and Limor Peer, Analyzing Neivspaper Content, A Howto Guide (Chicago, IL: Northwestern University, Readership Institute, Media Management Center, 2002), 19. 25. Thomas Patterson, Doing Well ami Doing Good: How Soft News and Critical journalism Are Shrinking the News Audience and Weakening Democracy - And What Neivs Outlets Can Do About It (Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy, 2000). 26. Greer and Mensing, "The Evolution of Online Newspapers." 27. As two reviewers of this manuscript have pointed out, this approach prevented us from including a large number of dailies with smaller print cirailations. We believe, however, that we have adequate variation in paper sizes to identify trends, even if we cannot generalize to the smallest papers. 28. Print circulation does not automatically predict online traffic but the two are strongly correlated. For example, the eight high-circulation papers in our sample average a 913 Web site ranking by Alexa.com while the eight medium papers average a 10,113 ranking and the eight smallest average a 35,000 ranking (based on January 2005 data). 838
louRNAusMfyMASS COMMUNICATION QuAtacHi.y
29. Initially we collected data on ten papers at each level, but there u-ere too many New York Papers (so the tabloids the Duily Neivs and the New York Post were later dropped) and errors in our automated data collection system contaminated results for two medium papers and one small. Another small paper was dropped at random for symmetry. 30. Daniel Riffe, Stephen Lacy, and Frederick Fico, Amih/zini^ Media Me!>sa,^t's: Using Quantitative Content Analysis in Research (Hillsdale, NJ:
Erlbaum, 1998). 31. A small amount of 2006 data was lost due to a technical problem with InfoMinder. The amount was not considered significant enough to jeopardize data analysis. 32. Dibean and Garrison, "How Six Online Newspapers Use Web Technologies," 79-93; Arant and Anderson, "Newspaper Online Editors Support Traditional Standards," 57-69; Greer and Mensing, "The Evolution of Online Newspapers." 33. See the local television news section of "The State of the News Media 2006: An Annual Report on American Journalism," http://www.stateofthemedia.com/2006/, Washington DC: Project for Excellence in Journalism. A similar point on the comparison between online news and broadcast journalism can be found in Donica Mensing and Jennifer Greer, "Above the Fold; A Comparison of the Lead Stories in Print and Online Newspapers," in Internet Newspapers: The Making of a Mainstream Medium, ed. Xigen Li (Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 2006). 34. Jane Singer, "Changes and Consistencies: Newspaper Journalists Contemplate Online Future," Newspaper Research Journal 18 (winter/spring 1997): 2-18.
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