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Abstract
Whilst new forms of presentation and user participation make a “way new journalism” possible, researchers around the world critically claim that news websites do not live up to their potential. To offer an explanation for the slow adaption of hyperlinks, multimedia, and interactive options, we examine if there is a path dependence between news websites’ online sophistication and their structural background. Based on a large-scale automated content analysis, we analyzed 65,000 news articles from nine countries. The results reveal that institutional factors (media system, nation, media type) are more relevant for predicting websites’ online sophistication than content-related factors. This suggests that, apart from a few remarkable exceptions, there is a path dependence on a news website’s media background.