Towards a Classification of Participatory News Websites

Abstract

Participatory news websites are a large, heterogeneous, and dynamic object of research which has been difficult to systematize scientifically. This paper presents an integrative instrument for classification and an evidence-based typology of participatory news websites. On the one hand, it extracts seven heuristic types from academic literature. On the other hand, it presents three empirical types which emerged as clusters from an analysis of 101 websites: Exclusive Thematic Dossiers, Commercial User Playgrounds, and Local Media Clippings. A comparison of the heuristic and empirical types shows that they are only partially congruent. It is concluded that the existing heuristic types should be relabeled in order to reflect reality more precisely.

An Appendix to this paper is available at:http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/21670811.2013.841367

KEYWORDS:

• classification
• cluster analysis
• participatory journalism
• participatory news
• typology

Notes

1. For the advantages and disadvantages of classifications, see Bailey (1994, 33).

2. The academic literature under analysis mainly consists of articles in peer-reviewed academic journals with a focus on journalism and digital media. It was the objective of this paper to identify those heuristic types and general typologies which were the most influential (and most widely cited) in this corpus of literature.

3. Strictly speaking, the types described in the academic literature cannot be considered purely heuristic because most of them were partly influenced by empirical observations. However, in the process of building these types, classification generally dominates over identification and conceptualization over measurement. Thus, for the analytic purposes of this paper and for the sake of simplicity, it can be considered legitimate to call these types “heuristic”.

4. Unfortunately, to the best of the author’s knowledge, Krishnamurthy’s (2002) typology has only been published as a conference paper. However, it constitutes an important contribution to the field and has influenced prominent scholars (Herring et al. 2005, 146).

5. Larsson (2012) employed a quite similar research design to investigate interactivity features on Swedish newspaper websites.

6. The eleven lists were drawn from widely cited online publications of prominent journalists and journalism scholars, e.g. Lasica (2003), Outing (2005), and Schaffer (2007), as well as from the websites of credible media outlets and NGOs, such as CyberJournalist.net (2008), Democracies Online (2008), dmoz – Open Directory Project (2008), Ourmedia (2008), and SourceWatch (2008). The lists contained between 9 and 77 entries each.

7. The transfer index, ranging from 1 to 3, measures whether there is a transfer of staff, content, and budget from the participatory news website to another media outlet.

8. Given the relatively small case numbers of this study, the findings section will not only refer to those results which are statistically significant but also on those which are only practically different. These have to be treated with particular caution.

9. These clusters are not purely empirical because the dimensions used to classify them are derived from heuristic types and general typologies. However, the method of cluster analysis comes very close to the idea of identification by empirical measurement (Bailey 1973, 19).