Technology and the Changing Idea of News: 2001 U.S. Newspaper Content at the Maturity of Internet 1.0 (original) (raw)

The Internet and News: Changes in Content on Newspaper Websites

2009

Journalists justify their professional practice as a service that informs the citizenry necessary for democracy, but trends over the last century, since the rise of professional aspirations among journalists, have involved a steady move away from textual practices of current event coverage centered on citizens and nearby places and toward journalists' own opinions of more distant issues. But the rise of the internet, in direct competition with print news, has accompanied several shifts in the news journalists produce. A content analysis for three mainstream U.S. newspaper internet sites in 2005 continues a project that has gathered measurements for the same newspapers since the 1890s and replicates a 2001 study, when most U.S. papers had established a presence online. On one hand, politics, as a core topic in public spirited journalism, has continued the older trends for the who, what, when, and where in story content: toward relatively long, analytical stories with explanations from officials and groups and references to other time periods and more distant places. On the other hand, accident stories typify the new, emergent news: short, less analytical, event-centered coverage linked to individuals, other current happenings, and an especially local focus. On their web editions, the larger, wealthier news organization tended toward the older news, but the smaller or less profitable organizations moved toward the new kind of news. The focus on current events and local politics may be salutary for the informed citizenry, but the loss of context for events makes it unclear whether the internet is an entirely positive news outlet. (255 words)

Introduction: The Evolution of Online Journalism

Siapera/The Handbook of Global Online Journalism, 2012

In 1993, a couple of months after the launch of the first web browser, Mosaic, the University of Florida ' s Journalism Department launched what is generally considered to be the first online journalism web site. It was a very basic, static web site, with a picture of the red-bricked wall of the Journalism Department. It was updated only occasionally, at nights and weekends, when the machine was not in use by others, running on a 486-25 processor with 4 megabytes of random access memory (RAM). About a year later, in November 1994, The UK ' s Daily Telegraph launched the Electronic Telegraph , which was a similarly static page, with articles one on top of the other. The online publication followed the rhythm of print publishing, posting online contents once a day. In a 2001 article, Derek Bishton detailed the Electronic Telegraph ' s remit: to explore the new medium, its technological and commercial possibilities, as well as the scope for the launch of the Telegraph as an online brand (Bishton, 2001). And in this rather slow, uneventful manner began the history of online journalism, and the creation of a new kind of journalism that has changed the face of journalism forever. The 20 years or so since then have seen developments that were both gradual, such as the slow adoption of the Internet ' s features of hyperlinking, interactivity, and multimediality, and radical, as witnessed by the shift toward the participatory web and social media. The initial reluctance of journalistic sites to employ these features was eventually replaced with unfettered enthusiasm, while more recently no self-respecting journalistic site remains without a blog, a Facebook, and Twitter account. Thus, the relationship between the new media and journalism, which began in fits and starts, has become a close embrace to the extent that it is difficult to imagine an exclusively offline journalism. Theorists, practitioners, students, and readers/consumers/users of online journalism are all involved and have a stake in this relationship, and seek to understand how journalism

Newspapers Experiment Online: Story Content After a Decade on the Web

Journalism: Theory, Practice & Critique, 2013

Mainstream U.S. newspapers since the 1890s moved away from event-centered news of local persons and places and toward interpretative news of more distant issues, a trend called the new long journalism that continued when the press moved online. By the mid 2000s social media and web interactivity were common, and print news had not yet entered the profitability and jobs crisis-to-come. A study in 2005 replicates and extends the baseline measures of online news content. The long journalism trends continued for politics, a core topic in serving the public, and for NYTimes.com, a leader in the media and innovator online. But for breaking news topics such as accidents and for less prominent news outlets, online content moved toward shorter, less analytical coverage linked to individuals, other current happenings, and an especially local focus. The results show how journalists were experimenting at a key moment in the development of online news.

'Newsrooms and the Disruption of the Internet' Mari

Focus Newsrooms and the Disruption of the Internet Newsrooms and the Disruption of the Internet is an insightful account of what happened when the internet first arrived in the 1990s and early 2000s in the recently computerized, but still largely unchanged, newspaper industry. Providing a focused narrative of how the internet disrupted news collection, editing, presentation and dissemination, the book examines the role of the internet from helpful adjunct to extension to, eventually, successor to the traditional print product. Experiments by large national newspaper "brands" and other first-adopters in the 1990s are described, tracing the slow adoption of the internet by chains and large metro papers, followed by smaller daily and weekly newspapers by the early 2000s. The book describes the changes that arrived as more "Web 2.0" technologies become prevalent and as social media shifted the news-media landscape in the mid-to-late 2000s, ultimately changing how most people in the West consumed and thought of "the news." This book is intended for academics and researchers in the fields of journalism studies, history of technology, and media studies, especially those interested in transitions from analog to digital technology, and the initial adoption of the commercial internet.

Journalism 2.0: Assessing How the Internet has Changed Journalism | by Michael Sanfey | Medium

Medium, 2018

Journalism 2.0: Assessing How the Internet has Changed Journalism by Michael Sanfey At the 2018 Lisbon Web Summit on November 8 one of the most interesting sessions I attended had the provocative title Is Journalism Dead? The event was chaired by Liam Proud of Reuters Breakingviews who was in conversation with Katherina Borchert of Mozilla and Lucie Beudet of Konbini. He led off by saying the answer to the question was clearly "no" but that all the same there are unprecedented challenges to journalism e.g. allegations of "fake news", and journalists being labelled "enemies of the people". To a considerable extent journalism is an industry "under siege" as the blurb for the event termed it, borne out by the fact that of attendees who took an online survey during the session, 70% felt journalism was in a "sick" state. In the Financial Times on 13 November, leading foreign affairs columnist Gideon Rachman wrote about Donald Trump and the global assault on press freedom. He noted that when the US President calls journalists "enemies of the people" it emboldens dictators. Perhaps the most egregious recent example was the brutal slaying of Saudi Arabian journalist Jamal Khashoggi at the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul. Turkish journalists themselves are under threat from their own authorities, and Rachman noted that "more than 20 Russian journalists have been murdered during Vladimir Putin's years, with most of the cases unsolved". [1] Problems with journalism are not a new phenomenon. In his 2012 article The Future of Journalism Bob Franklin wrote that a "crisis in journalism" frame had been widely adopted to understand and respond to the current changes in journalism, featuring "dramatic closures of newspaper titles, along with plummeting falls in circulation, journalists' jobs and advertising revenues in the United States, the United Kingdom and Europe".