CHAPTER 14
	Online News

There are plenty of bright people who are absolutely convinced that the future of news is online. That may be so, but as Chapter 1 makes clear, the future isn’t now—nor is it all that clear. The web as replacement for TV would also represent a significant departure from history. Over the years, as new technology has come along, older media have been forced to change and evolve. But none has disappeared.

The web does offer a new dimension currently unavailable to any other medium. Not surprisingly, then, the web is an increasingly important source of news and information and an increasingly important part of traditional media’s news and information offerings.

More and more, stations break news on the first available medium, and that’s commonly the web. In addition, TV stations now report that almost 30 percent (28.6 percent) of web content is only on the web—and not on air. That’s a new development, and it suggests that stations are really starting to understand that the web isn’t simply an extension of the on-air brand. It’s a lot more than that.

SOME BASIC TERMS AND CONCERNS

There is a difference between the Internet and the World Wide Web (or web). The Internet is the infrastructure that allows computers to communicate with each other. The web is the network (or web) over which that communication takes place. Email is not a part of the web—even though you may well be able to access your email via the web. Email is, however, sent over the Internet.

The URL is the address of a website. It stands for uniform resource locator. The end of the basic address—after the period but before any slashes—is the domain. The domain indicates either the type or the purpose or the geography of the website.

 

 

Sites that end in .gov are official U.S. government websites. That doesn’t necessarily make the data correct. Government and government agencies can be self-serving and just plain make mistakes, but at least you have a source that should be worth citing.

Sites that end .edu are education sites, like a university. But many schools make their system available to faculty, students, staff and alumni. A site marked .edu may or may not be an official university site.

Sites ending in .org are owned by nonprofit organizations. Nonprofit doesn’t necessarily mean unbiased or authoritative. Many nonprofits are also advocates for a variety of interest groups. Again, this is useful information to know, but nothing about .org at the end of a URL guarantees accuracy.

Sites ending in .com are commercial sites. But that doesn’t mean those sites can’t contain good, unbiased information. Virtually all the news sites—newspaper and broadcast—are .com sites because they sell online advertising.

As the Internet has grown, so have the online suffixes. Many are additional commercial endings, and many denote country of origin, or at least licensure, like .ca for Canada, .mx for Mexico and .au for Australia.

RESEARCH AND THE WEB

The Internet is certainly in the process of revolutionizing news. Start with research and news gathering. A staggering amount of material that was once available only in reference books or courthouses is now readily available to everyone online. Census data, health statistics, proposed legislation and legal rulings are examples of such factual material. The federal government, states, counties, cities and even towns are all making much of their data available.

This is especially helpful for the broadcast journalist. Few broadcast journalists have the time to do research in a library, so while the Internet has made research faster and easier for all journalists, in many cases it’s simply opened the door for research on the broadcast side. Essentially, all television stations today have ready access to the Internet.

Unfortunately, the widespread democratization of the web means that anyone and everyone can make information available online. The greatest research challenge today remains separating accurate, reliable data from random, self-serving opinion. You can’t be too careful about where information comes from, and, given the potentially anonymous nature of the web, that’s probably even more true for online material than other sources.

The Internet is a great tool, but it’s not a substitute for critical thinking, checking with other sources and other research. Research generally involves collecting information, locating people, and confirming information you already have. There are search engines (like google.com), subject directories (like Yahoo.com) and restricted subject area search tools (like findlaw.com). The quality of your research depends on where you go, the quality of your questions and the evaluation of both your information choices and the material itself.

Through email, the Internet also allows journalists to conduct interviews online. Be cautious. First, there’s no substitute for a face-to-face interview. You get to see the person you’re talking to; you get to know if there’s anyone else present during the interview who might influence the answers; you get to see the body language of how that person reacts to you and your questions; you get to hear the nuances of how someone answers a question; and you get to know with reasonable certainty that the person you’re talking to is the person you think you’re talking to.

Most of those things are lost in email interviews—starting with the certainty of whom you’re interviewing. Consider email interviews as a last information-gathering resort, and note in the story that you received the answer via email.

Still, it’s a great way to follow up with someone you interviewed in person or on the phone to get quick clarification on a point. Again, phone contact is preferable, but email can be a useful way to reach a hard-to-pin-down, busy person. It’s a great way to set up an interview. It may also be your only choice to reach someone far away. Just recognize the drawbacks and act accordingly.

THE INFORMATION WEBSITE

Almost all television (99 percent) and radio (93 percent) stations have websites. All television websites include local news, and more than four out of five (83 percent) radio websites run local news. There are three general models for the construction and management of station websites.

The first model is the “someone else does it” approach. The major company here used to be Internet Broadcasting (formerly IBS, Internet Broadcasting Systems, www.ibsys.com). IB is owned by a blend of broadcasting companies, including Hearst Television and Post-Newsweek. In this model, IB built and maintained the website, and the only thing local news people had to do was make their material available for use online. IB typically supplied editorial staff members who worked with the material. Other support came from IB’s St. Paul, Minnesota, headquarters. Over time, the model has evolved to be closer to the template model (described next). Examples of IB websites include WJXT-TV in Jacksonville, Florida (www.news4jax.com), WCVB-TV in Boston (www.thebostonchannel.com), and KGTV in San Diego (www.10news.com).

The second model is the website template. Most commonly, this involves an outside company providing the station with a template into which the station plugs its local news. WorldNow (www.worldnow.com) is the dominant player in this group. The outside company maintains the site and even arranges for national and international news. Here, station people are required to be involved in the website, but the level of involvement depends on how much the station cares about the site. Involvement can be as minimal as pressing a button to send copy to the website or putting together an elaborate multimedia story just for the web. WorldNow examples include KGUN-TV in Tucson, Arizona (www.kgun9.com), KLAS-TV in Las Vegas (www.8newsnow.com), and WOI-TV in Des Moines, Iowa (www.woi-tv.com).

The third model involves the station—many times in conjunction with the parent company—doing and maintaining everything. More and more stations appear to be heading in this direction. Obviously, that requires more station and/or corporate staff to put together and keep going. Gannett has taken this approach for its stations, including WUSA-TV in Washington, DC (www.wusa9.com). The same is true for WRAL-TV in Raleigh, North Carolina (www.wral.com) and KSHB-TV in Kansas City, Missouri (www.nbcactionnews.com).

Web Design

As you wander through the web, notice that there are no hard-and-fast rules for much of anything. From site to site, design varies from minimalist to frenetic, and the fact that so many information websites continue to be redesigned so often is testament to the continuous but unfulfilled search for the perfect information website structure and organization.

Little within the sites is standardized either. Some sites use graphics for navigation; some sites use hypertext; some use both. Some sites work hard at not forcing the user to scroll down the page; some sites force the user to scroll forever. Click or scroll?

It’s a new medium, so it shouldn’t be a surprise that there are more questions than answers. We are, in essence, still defining what the web is. It looks like a TV, but you read it from 18 inches away, on a screen that shows much less text than we can see on the printed page.

Complicating the production further, news is most commonly generated by people whose orientation is either print or broadcast, and it shows in each news website.

News on the Web

Start with how people use the web: They don’t just read, they scan, surf, scroll, chat and click. It’s activist sitting. In between, they check email, answer landlines or mobile phones, and they commonly have the radio, a CD or television on in the background. Or the foreground. It’s a multimedia experience even before people do anything.

Despite the ease with which people declare what news on the web should look like, there’s remarkably little good research on what users really want. For instance, it’s really hard to imagine that most web users want a news home page that makes the Las Vegas strip seem placid by comparison. But take a look at some of the news websites, complete with scrolling, flashing and assorted animation, and busy to the point of tawdry comes to mind. Perhaps part of the problem is the pull between content people—who seem to want to put every story on the home page, along with links to everything they have ever produced—and sales people—who appear to want to sell every sliver of white space with blinking, moving and flashing ads. Less is frequently more, but you’d certainly never suspect that based on most news websites.

Part of this is probably also the result of the news media not knowing how to deal with a loss of control. For television and radio—newspapers and magazines, too—the producers of news determine order and priorities. On the web, the user is in control. So the typical news website seems to respond by adding more material and special features in hopes that something will appeal to someone. And then there are the ads, polls, games and so on.

Sometimes these overarching principles seem to get lost, but there are two key points to keep in mind when putting together stories for the web:

 

1. The user is in control. Here the model is closer to newspaper. Editors can put whatever they want on page one, but nothing prevents the reader from starting with sports or the comics. In broadcast, the producer determines the sequence, and there are no changes allowed. On the web, users will decide what captures their attention and where to go. Although recent studies show that most users enter information websites via the home page, many users do not. So the web is really unlike any medium that precedes it. Theoretically, a newspaper reader could skip to the end of the story and might well randomly look at pictures or charts, but, at its best, the web user is in full control. The user can start wherever and go wherever, deeper and deeper in one narrow direction, perhaps never returning to the broader story or any part of it. Or, more commonly, glance at headline after headline until something appeals enough to click.

2. Web information remains linear. Web consumption is driven by the audience, and while the experience itself is nonlinear, that doesn’t mean that the information itself is nonlinear. In fact, the information website is constructed as a series of short, linear information experiences. What’s nonlinear isn’t the information—or the packets or chunks of information that make up the website or pages of a website. What’s nonlinear is the user’s opportunity for consumption.

 

Readers can take varying paths through a website, with each experience different from the next.

There are also divergent philosophies among information websites about what news to emphasize. Some information websites are all about local. National and international news can be accessed on demand, but everything featured on the home page is local. Some information websites routinely include just about everything. Some vary, reacting to the day’s (or hour’s) events.

Not surprisingly, the philosophy of the operation determines at least some aspects of the content.

Newspaper websites are likely to use photographs and picture galleries. Television websites are more likely to use video. Radio websites tend to include more audio. Web news producers tend to favor what they know based on their own background—and what their organization is most likely to produce.

In fact, the web experience potentially includes everything traditional media provide—and more. It offers headlines (print), still photos (print), moving pictures (TV), audio (radio), photo captions (print), slide shows—with and without audio (presentation media), lists and bullet points (print, TV and presentation media), tables, graphs, charts and maps (print, mostly, and TV and presentation media, too), sidebars (print), letters (print), summaries (print), animation (TV occasionally), surveys (newspaper and TV), data visualization (presentation media), message boards, hypertext, live chats, weblogs (blogs), databases and games (all mostly web devices).

Constructing Web news

HEADLINES: Straightforward headlines work best. In many cases, the headline may be the only thing a user sees in order to decide whether to click on it and take a look. A cute or humorous headline may just puzzle the user.

 

PROBLEM HEADLINES:

• Supreme Court: Smith Can Proceed with DTF Hearings

• Honda Leads List of Top 10 Most Stolen Cars

• Diabetes, Erectile Dysfunction, Heart Disease Share Common Link

• Witnesses Decry Horse Doping in House Testimony

 

Headlines need to be clear instantly, and they need to attempt to grab the user’s attention. The first example, above, has two problems. First, it doesn’t make clear that it was the State Supreme Court, and, second, it uses initials that aren’t widely and instantly recognized (Drug Task Force). The second example says too much. Better to tell people that there’s a new list of the 10 most-stolen cars. People will check to see if theirs is on the list. The third example is much too long and involved, despite its lack of clarity. In the last example, “decry” is a short, but seldom-used term, and “in House Testimony” can be read multiple ways and is confusing. Keep it simple.

 

UTILITARIAN HEADLINES:

• U.S. Judge Blocks Oil, Gas Drilling in Wisconsin

• Two Injured in SW Las Vegas Shooting

• Ford Recalls More Than 650,000 Trucks

• Report Cites Abuses by Mexican Military

 

These are all simple and straightforward. Notice that most are shorter than the first group. This is especially important for the rapidly increasing number of people who may first hear about news on a mobile device. As a general rule, keep headlines under 60 characters, including spaces. That’s close to where Google truncates headlines in a search, and Google remains the dominant player in how people arrive at a website.

 

BETTER HEADLINES:

• Wounded Officer Battles for His Life

• Car of the Future Not So Far Away

• Iraq Handing Out Cash to People on the Street

• Rapist Gets 25 Years and a Little Mercy

 

Still short, all of these are more interesting, more compelling and more likely to have users click on them—which, after all, is what the headline is supposed to accomplish.

Remember that the reader/user is frequently scanning for information rather than reading.

There’s also increasing—and well-founded—concern that more and more web headlines are written less with the idea of informing an audience and more from the idea of SEO (search engine optimization) and pandering to what Australian journalist Mel Campbell calls “lurid clickability.”

LEADS: Because web stories have headlines and maybe subheads, the lead of the web story doesn’t need to fulfill the same role as in broadcast. Generally, the web story starts with something akin to newspaper’s inverted pyramid—a sentence that generally tells what the story is about. After that, it’s kind of a free-for-all. Newspapers tend to produce web stories that look like shorter versions of traditional print stories. They move from the traditional lead through a traditional print-type story. There is a tendency for a more casual writing style—like broadcast—but that’s not consistent. Not surprisingly, broadcasters tend to model their stories more like broadcast, with a hard main point lead and shorter stories.

As you go through website after website, it’s generally easy to tell whether it’s a newspaper- or broadcast-based site just by reading the lead.

 

BROADCAST WEBSITE LEADS (WITH NAMES ALTERED):

• Three North Dakota teenagers are in the hospital this morning after an overnight crash in Jones County.

• Smithville Power says its residential customers will be paying 22 percent more for electricity this year than last year.

• Authorities have charged the son of state Rep. John Jones in connection with a shooting that left another man wounded.

• Smithville police said a man trapped in a collapsed tunnel for over four hours has been pulled out.

 

Note that all of those examples are hard, main point leads, just the way you’d run them on the air.

 

NEWSPAPER WEBSITE LEADS (WITH NAMES ALTERED):

• Some Smithville residents are supporting a new district proposal to dredge and remove vast amounts of bulrushes, cattails and other vegetation that has grown thick along the lower Jones River, choking the open water and narrowing the channel.

• Gov. Brown ordered an additional 2,000 National Guard members to help battle California’s blazes Friday, the same day President Obama announced plans to survey the damage.

• In a move that signals the state’s newly deregulated auto insurance system is making the market more competitive, Smith Insurance Conglomerate, the nation’s largest insurance company, will soon start selling auto policies in North Carolina.

• After studying 21 years’ worth of traffic fatality statistics, researchers say there may be a positive correlation between high gas prices and road safety.

 

As with broadcast website leads, the newspaper website leads are really fairly traditional print leads. All these leads are serviceable, although the first and third are far more complex and contorted than they need to be. Note that the broadcast website leads are far more conversational—clearly a result of their origin. Also clear: We haven’t arrived at a consensus on exactly how web news stories should begin.

CHUNKS: All the different possibilities for online storytelling could be overwhelming, especially to a user who just wants an overview of a topic or maybe a small piece of information. So, to make the information more user-friendly, there is a tendency to break up information into chunks. This involves splitting a story into its major components, each of which is largely self-contained, and each of which constitutes a chunk. Don’t confuse chunks with paragraphs. A chunk is likely to include a number of paragraphs. The key with the chunk is that all the material within the chunk is related to one element of a story or to an overview of the story. Many websites also routinely add space between paragraphs to improve the appearance and break up the text.

Let’s look at an example.

A few years ago, a scientific study found that the rate of skin cancer, melanoma, had been rising significantly over the last 30–40 years for younger women but not for younger men. The story received widespread but short-term coverage in the media. TV stations ran the story as a VO or VO/SOT or package and mostly used shots of young people (mostly women) sunbathing outside or tanning inside. Newspapers ran 10–15 inches; a few may have added a chart showing the increase. What could a website do with it, and how could it be chunked?

The study itself was straightforward and could be handled in one chunk, which should definitely include a chart showing the increase and the difference in increases between men and women (since the difference was significant). Another chunk could have included what to look for if you’re concerned about having melanoma. Video might be possible, but there are medical sites that you could link to with plenty of pictures. You could also put together a chunk listing the risk factors for melanoma. That material is readily available as well. It would be possible to put together video or audio on a question and answer with a physician, and it would be possible to put together a video, audio or slide show story of someone’s battle with melanoma. That’s five chunks, and others are available.

How to chunk information involves evaluating the characteristics or characters of a story. What kind of story is it? What are the different aspects or divisions of a story? How can you divide it by subject area? How can you divide it by technology? Think about the audience. Who is it? Who is it supposed to be? Who else might be interested? Is there a target audience?

Those chunks of information must each be largely self-supporting, because there’s no telling which, if any, chunks the consumer has read prior to reading any other. But they also can’t be so repetitious that the user who has read other material won’t learn anything. It’s the same kind of quandary facing the producer of the late news. In many cases, half the audience watched the station’s 6 P.M. news, and half did not. Simply repeating material from 6 P.M. to 10 or 11 P.M. will bore those people who saw the earlier newscast, but leaving out the material potentially eliminates important news. The key, then, is emphasizing important points without sounding like you’re repeating.

Information provided as bullet points, charts, graphs, tables, graphics and so on work especially well on the web because people can take in that information—or ignore it—quickly and easily. So look for material that lends itself to those presentation forms.

A simple chart could look like this:

 

NEW CASES OF SKIN CANCER PER 100,000

WHITE MEN AND WOMEN, AGE 18–39

 

A bullet point list on the story could look like this:

SKIN CANCER: WHAT TO LOOK FOR:

• Suspicious moles or lesions

• Half the mole doesn’t match the other half

• The mole edges are ragged or blurred

• The mole color isn’t uniform

• The mole or growth is larger than the diameter of a pencil eraser

 

STYLE: Most news websites have moved away from the extensive internal links throughout every story, but it varies. The New York Times (nytimes.com) still uses extensive internal links. At this writing, the Washington Post (washingtonpost. com) uses fewer, and other papers, like the Los Angeles Times (latimes.com) and most TV news websites also have fewer internal links. There’s some thinking that those are distracting. It may make more sense to include links in a separate box or at the end of each chunk or at the end of the story. Again, there’s little consistency here.

Because there’s no telling what the user has read before or where the user will go next, people in stories will have to be identified within each area, and initials and acronyms must either be introduced right at the top or done more than once. Attribution appears to be more often at the end, like print, but that’s not consistent, and a lot of websites work hard at using present tense, as in broadcast.

Interestingly, in the lead examples above from print and broadcast websites, both groups are mixed on the use of broadcast’s present tense versus print’s more common past tense.

Theoretically, the web has the ability to provide the best of what both print and broadcast can offer. Obviously, it can offer words and information—and it can even exceed print in total volume if warranted. It can offer moving pictures and audio. While newspapers can run a few pictures, the web can run a gallery. While newspaper or TV can run a chart, the web can do that along with a searchable database of information that can answer questions about each user’s zip code, local school district or block. It can take a newspaper’s depth of coverage to new levels. It can provide the animation that television is capable of but rarely uses. And it can be as immediate as radio.

The value of hypertext is the ability to go deeper, further and wider than ever before. The downside, for the news producer, is the loss of control on news consumption. From a user’s standpoint, this is a dream come true. It’s no different than someone hearing or reading a story and wondering about some related point—except that, with the web, the person can go there instead of just wondering about it.

Those links can also allow a reporter to provide the detailed evidence to support statements written in the story, side issues, background and older articles in the archive. Each of those areas involves depth that most readers won’t want but at least some will find interesting.

The writing style that’s developing for the web appears to be a cross between print and broadcast. It’s tighter and more conversational—like broadcast. But it tends to have more detail—like print. In some cases, stories appear to be print stories, written in broadcast style. In these cases, more attention is given to tight, short, declarative sentences, active, one idea per sentence, logical flow of information. At some sites, there appears to be a trend toward more use of humor or opinion.

A number of journalists (especially print ones) describe the web style as a reversion back to the inverted pyramid. But Jonathan Dube (jondube.com) of AOL and CyberJournalist.net suggests that a better visualization would be the “Model T.” In this system, the lead is a long horizontal line, conceptually like the print lead, summarizing the story and telling why it matters. But the vertical line, according to Dube, can be a range of structures depending on the information and the approach. It could be a traditional inverted pyramid (like newspaper), or it could be a narrative (more like TV), an anecdote, or something else.

Some argue that the complete essence of a story must be told within the first four paragraphs. Part of that reasoning is so that people who leave the story will have gotten the gist of it. Others argue to make the first paragraph inclusive and tight because more and more people are expected to receive the material via phone. And a phone screen will display limited text at one time.

More and more, stations are taking the view that they need to get information out as fast as they can on the first and best medium for it. That might be breaking into programming for a live report, but mostly it’s getting the news out on the station website or to mobile users.

Online Writing Rules

Seven rules for writing online:

 

  1. It’s still journalism. Do it right. Speed is helpful; mistakes are not.

  2. Think about the medium. What different techniques can you use to tell different parts of the story—or, perhaps, the same parts in different ways?

  3. Think about readers or users. They’re sitting 18 inches from a monitor with lots of choices, and even as they read, they’re holding a device (the mouse) to make new choices. What will capture their attention? What do they want to know? What might some of them want to know? Use quotes. Build in surprises. Appeal personally (like broadcast). Think about how you’ll grab the attention of the scanning user.

  4. The headline needs to provide concrete information. In many cases, users may be faced with a choice simply based on the headline. Think about whether they’ll know enough to make a choice. The lead/opening paragraph needs to tell the overall story tightly and succinctly. Remember that every sentence determines whether the next sentence will be read. Every choice provides alternative ways to go. Make sure there’s a clear geographic identifier in the headline, subhead or lead.

  5. The experience may be nonlinear, but each element of the information is linear. And each of those elements needs to be self-supporting. Stories are a collection of short linear pieces that could very well be consumed in a random, nonlinear manner. Use links to split long blocks into multiple pages.

  6. Think interactivity. Think about what you can present or include that can get the user involved. That could include the ability to personalize the data for each user or a variety of multimedia tools.

  7. Try new things. There’s a lot more we don’t know about using the web than what we do know. Experiment and learn.

 

Other issues

The nature of the web and its 24-hour news cycle also offer the opportunity to amplify the biggest problems in the media. Mistakes can live forever in the system unless media develop and follow up on a comprehensive plan to correct stories, including those already archived.

It’s clear that there’s a lot more “point-of-view journalism” on the web than we see in traditional media. That raises questions about whether anyone does or should care about your opinion … and whether “point-of-view journalism” is really journalism.

The web offers a competitive world much more like TV than newspaper. In most communities, there is one paper, take it or leave it. There are always choices in television. Even more so on the web. That kind of intense competition can energize reporters and editors. It can also lead to bad choices resulting from inadequate thought. And because the web is potentially even more immediate than television, it can amplify TV’s potential for speed ahead of facts, accuracy and context.

HYPERLOCAL NEWS

Just like it sounds, hyperlocal news is simply news about a much smaller community than we commonly see covered. Most often, hyperlocal means geography—coverage of relatively small communities within the larger market. That could be anything from a defined neighborhood to a small town. Hyperlocal could also be defined by a common or shared area of interest, like a school district.

As this is written, there is a battle shaping up on hyperlocal coverage. First, we see more and more traditional news outlets—both print and broadcast—developing hyperlocal coverage of specific areas within their overall market. Fisher Communications, for example, with TV stations primarily in the northwest United States, has been heavily involved in hyperlocal news attached to the company’s TV websites. Second, we’re seeing more and more independent hyperlocal news websites. Sometimes staffed by energetic, interested citizens, sometimes by laid-off former newspaper reporters, sometimes a project funded by nonprofit grants, these sites fill a hyperlocal niche within the larger market area. Third, we’re seeing the development of a national hyperlocal effort funded by AOL with its subsidiary Patch. Mostly in the Northeast and California, AOL plans to roll out local patches across the country.

We’re also seeing some efforts at blending the small, independent hyperlocal sites with traditional media. Some of these are informal ties; some involve the greater formality of the FCC’s agreement to allow Comcast to purchase a controlling interest in NBC where NBC stations are required to work with some independent hyperlocal websites.

Hyperlocal frequently translates into backpack journalists working out of a car and home rather than an office. But the model and (business) future of hyperlocal news is very much up in the air at this point. Hyperlocal also tends to reflect a blending of traditional news and more broadly defined information, like community bulletin boards.

MULTIMEDIA

Most of what news organizations put on the web isn’t multimedia—it’s multiple media. Text with pictures or video or audio isn’t multimedia; it’s just two media put side by side. Real multimedia—the true integration of text, information graphics (with animation, rollovers and so on), video and slideshows is really reserved for special stories done by a handful of larger (mostly newspaper based) websites.

Mostly, news organizations use the web as another platform for what they have always produced. TV websites mostly include the same video that they have or will put on the air along with text that they or AP or other services generate.

Newspaper websites run mostly text, although many have gotten better about not just dumping newspaper text onto web pages. They run more still pictures, including photos that the newspaper never could have handled before. More and more, they’re also using video, which too often looks painfully amateurish. Some have attempted audio/still slide shows, which usually demonstrate a complete lack of understanding about how you edit audio and pictures.

Almost all information websites have gotten much better about expanding their news coverage, offering more varied elements (video, audio), and even providing for at least some user interactivity, although that’s mostly comments on news or blogs or sending in pictures.

Nearly all TV websites (96 percent) run video and almost as many (92 percent) run still pictures. Close to two-thirds of TV websites include audio (63 percent) and blogs (63 percent). Over half have mobile-related material (56 percent) and live cameras (54 percent). More than 40 percent (42 percent) have recorded newscasts and close to that have live newscasts (37 percent) and streaming audio (34 percent). About 9 percent of web content is now user-generated.

What few broadcast websites have done is move into real multimedia. Go to the New York Times (nytimes.com), and click on multimedia. Take a look at the interactive graphics there and such things as calculators to determine whether it makes more sense to buy a home or rent.

At the Washington Post (washingtonpost.com), click on multimedia, and look at “The hidden life of guns” or “Top secret America.”

Go to the Las Vegas Sun (www.lasvegassun.com), click on Guides, and look at the History of Las Vegas.

All those examples—few of which can be found at any broadcast web site—really demonstrate what the web is capable of doing. Those multimedia presentations take time, and they’re not applicable for the fleeting news of the day. But for ongoing stories, for significant institutions or issues in a given community, that’s a real demonstration of what the web can do. And, over time, it’s going to be more and more what the online news consumer comes to expect.

THREE-SCREEN APPROACH TO NEWS

As this is written, two-thirds of all TV stations say they have a three-screen approach to news. What that means is that the station has some sort of plan to deliver news on television (screen 1), online (the computer monitor is screen 2) and mobile (screen 3). There’s some debate about whether the tablet, primarily the iPad, is simply another mobile device or whether it’s the fourth screen.

 

STATIONS AND A THREE-SCREEN APPROACH TO NEWS

	Yes	No
All TV	69.9%	30.1%
Market:
1–25	63.6	36.4
26–50	82.6	17.4
51–100	84.0	16.0
101–150	64.1	35.9
151+	52.8	47.2

 

Essentially, all news directors still view the TV screen as the most important, and almost all news directors view the computer screen (online) as the second most important. But there are a lot of people who think that, ultimately, there might be more money available in mobile than online, so some sort of mobile plan is becoming increasingly common and important in today’s newsrooms, and stations are furiously developing apps (mostly free) to take advantage of both mobile and tablet markets.

SUMMARY

Online news has become a critical part of virtually every traditional news outlet, although even the most successful information websites produce only a small fraction of the revenue of the station (or newspaper). There’s a difference between the web and the Internet. The Internet opens up tremendous possibilities for researching news stories, but it’s not without potential problems. There are different models for the operation of station websites, and there are clearly no firm design standards for news websites. The nonlinear aspect of the web means that the user is in control, but stories on the web still involve linear chunks in a nonlinear environment. Hyperlocal news is a growing phenomenon even though the business model is still hazy. True multimedia is still more of a promise than a reality—especially at broadcast websites. Two-thirds of TV news directors say they have a three-screen approach to news, with the TV screen 1, the computer screen 2, and the mobile screen 3.

KEY WORDS & PHRASES

World Wide Web

Internet

url

domain

research on the web

search engines

subject directories

restricted subject area search tools

information websites

web design

nonlinear

SEO

hyperlocal news

multimedia

three-screen approach

EXERCISES

A. Compare the website for your local newspaper with the website of one of the major local television stations. How are they different, and how are they similar? Compare how each handles a major local news story that both are covering. Which does a better job on local, national and international news? Support your views with concrete examples.

B. Compare the websites of the local television stations within your market. How are they different, and how are they similar? Compare how each handles a major local news story that both are covering. Which does a better job on local, national and international news? Support your views with concrete examples.

C. Using the story scenarios at the end of Chapter 8 (Stories), develop a multimedia online plan for the handling of each of the stories. List all the possible elements that you could include for each of the stories—including elements that would require additional reporting.

D. Based on the discussion in the chapter, evaluate which local information websites do the best job of real multimedia reporting. Pick out the three best, local multimedia stories and explain why you think so.