XplanaZine

By Frank Nevius

The e-newspaper is important as print newspapers continue their forty year decline, steadily losing audience as the traditional way of presenting news fails to appeal to younger generations. From 1964 when more than 80% of the U.S. adult population read a daily newspaper to 2003 when only 54%  read  (Crosbie, 2004), market penetration went from slightly less than 100% in the 1960s  to 67% by 1989 (New York Times, Jan. 1991). 

Print newspapers are increasingly committing themselves to online newspapers as their future. The presentation of news has shifted from the traditional print frame to a hybrid one that uses electronic framing structures while still referring back to the print origins. Ten Internet newspapers were accessible on the Web in 1994 (Li, 2006). By 1996, this had increased to 248 dailies available on the Web, rapidly expanding to 745 in 1997 (Meyer, 1997), 2,059 by September of 1998 (Peng, Irene & Hao, 1999), and more than 4,000 available by 2004 (NewsLink, 2004). Their new structures appear successful with readers increasing from less than 5% in 1995 to 35% by 2002 (Pew, 2002), or 58.7 million visitors to newspaper Web sites per month (Editor and Publisher, 2007). 

Newspapers’ traditional cash cows of classified ads, advertisements and news have been largely taken over by Google and Yahoo targeted ads, Craigslist.org free classifieds, and free news from CNN, MSN and other collecting points. Their design — which they hope will ultimately win loyal readers — typically emphasizes a “first screen”  with 4 to 6 main stories, 7 to 10 features that highlight specific issues of interest such as fashion awards and key international news, and  7 to 10 sections of broad categories such as USA, World, Work & Money, Books, Education, Religion, etc. These newspapers tend to use more headings for news categories, and fewer abstracts or entire stories on the first screen, assuming active users will select what they are interested in. Even abstracts have shrunk to an average of 15 to 21 words. There is also access to electronic archives (Peng et al., 1999), a news frame of quantity that generally includes 70 or more articles, commentaries, photo galleries, airfare specials, travel planners and so on in almost limitless profusion, but in easily digestible “chunks” for easy filtration. Furthermore, there is increased visual emphasis in more graphics/pictures and video stories, blurring the line between television and newspapers.

Online papers allow a high level of personal news customization by readers. They assume technically-savvy users desire multiple customizing options such as the ability to add or subtract international news categories,  place a specific category such as sports news at the top of the first screen, expand weather or financial news, etc.  Breaking with print tradition, they now even have custom advertisements in headers and sidebars on every screen of the online paper.

A challenge of online newspapers is how to select news when the once-a-day standard of print newspapers is no longer relevant. Most online news has adjusted to this environment by posting stories as soon as they are gained in order to “scoop” competition and increase audience interest by their up-to-date attributes, often using time signatures such as “16 minutes ago.”  This emphasis on speed, combined with shorter stories, has expanded  “bidding” for keywords that describe their stories in seach engines. Both the New York Times and the Washington Post, for example, use keyword bidding and purchase up to tens of thousands of them a year (Steel, 2007).  They seek popular terms such as “Iraq War” or “Apple news” to try to gain new users.  This is an acceleration of a news trend towards popular topics and news and away from investigative journalism which is more likely to be of only local interest.

WORKS CITED:
Crosbie, Vin. What Newspapers and their Web Sites Must Do to Survive, Annenberg Online Journalism Review, 2004.

Xigen Li, Ed.  Internet Newspapers: The Making of a Mainstream Medium, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2006.

Meyer, E.K. “An unexpectedly wider Web for the world’s newspapers,” American Journalism Review  Newslink, 2002. September 1998.

“Newspapers on the Internet,” Newslink, 2002. Retrieved May 31, 2004 from Http://newslink.org/news.html.

“Newspaper Online Readership Jumped in Q4, Setting Records,” Editor and Publisher, February 22, 2007.

Peng, F.Y., Irene, N. & Hao, X.  “Trends in online newspapers: A look at the U.S. Web,” Newspaper Research Journal,1999, 20(2), 52-63.

“Public’s news habits little changed by September 11,”  Pew Research Center for the People and the Press. June 9, 2002.  Retrieved October 30, 2003 from http://people-press.org/reports/display.php3?pageID=612.

“Rethinking Newspapers,” New York Times, January 6, 1991, C6.

Steel, Emily. “Keywords: a Growing Cost for News Sites,” The Wall Street Journal, April 30, 2007, B6.