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Abstract
Drawing on the theories of new media and Domingo’s typology of interactivity, this paper examines the presence of interactive and participatory features on the websites of six Indian national dailies. The analysis reveals that newspapers offered its readers/users a wide variety of interactive features to “digitally manage” their “news environment.” Presence of features such as interactive polling, voting and star-grading media text, commenting and flagging a comment for error and abuse inter alia enabled readers/users to annotate the news content and provide feedback. Online forums, blogs, comment threads and other interactive features present on the website are affordances that are capable of fostering dialogue between user-user, user-machine and user-journalist. However, interactive features facilitating citizen journalism was not as ubiquitous as other dimensions on the websites of the newspapers studied. Out of six, only one newspaper had a dedicated section where readers/citizens could submit news of their neighborhood.
Notes
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1 A shorter version of this paper was presented at the UGC-Sponsored National Seminar on “Mass Communication-Challenges, Trends and Future” organized by St. Stephens College, Uzhavoor, Kerala, India during 12–13 November, 2014. Important suggestions given by the panellists have been incorporated in this paper.
2 The websites of the six newspapers were analyzed for one week during 9–15 July 2015. Again these websites were analyzed for three weeks from 25 March to 15 April 2015.