(NO) NEWS ON THE WORLD WIDE WEB?

Abstract

Facing growing competition from new forms of user-generated content like wikis and blogs, media companies now claim they will finally fulfill the promises of a “whole new journalism” on the Internet. This comparative content analysis of 10 online news media in five countries (United States, France, United Kingdom, Germany and Russia) is a “reality check” assessing whether these claims are true. Data on formal characteristics and content categories of 1603 full articles are used to identify national specifics as well as general trends in European and US online journalism. Looking at the overall findings of the study, one has to conclude that the promises of an interactive age of reporting are not fulfilled yet. Most of the websites analyzed revealed a lack of multi-media content, missing options of direct interaction with the journalists, a fairly standardized repertoire of article types, missing source/author attributions, and a general focus on domestic political news.

Keywords:

• comparative study
• content analysis
• online journalism

Notes

1. Russia can be seen as a deviation from the “most similar systems” approach—its political, economic and social structure is different from the Western European countries. However, we felt that it might be helpful to contrast the findings of the largest EU countries with a large Eastern European country in order to see whether similarities are only due to the Western European context or more general trends in online journalism.

2. There are more top sites in most countries under analysis, and the choice of two is certainly a difficult one in many cases. For example, the inclusion of the BBC as the only site without a newspaper parent is somewhat inconsistent with the other sites. However, we still decided to include it here based on its importance as an online news source in the United Kingdom (and around the world).

3. The two weeks analyzed here were chosen since they did not include any nation-specific specialities (like elections) or international topics that could influence the composition of the news portfolio worldwide (like the outbreak of a disease or a war).

4. For a discussion of the meaning and development of bylines in journalism, see also Reich (2007).