Running head: ONLINE NEWS PRESENTATION AND JOURNALISTIC VALUES

Online News Presentation

and Journalistic Values

Steve Earley

Elon University

May 2010

Introduction

Embedded in the familiar structure of a newspaper are the news values that guide

journalists' decision-making. Tiered headlines reflect newsworthiness. Bylined articles and

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signed letters to the editor reflect accountability. Explicit labeling of special advertising sections

and the absence of ads on editorial pages reflect editorial independence. Refined over decades,

the format grew up with the industry, each settling into its current form around the middle third

of the 20th century. Standards for presenting news on the Web, meanwhile, are just beginning to

be defined. It's been hardly 10 years since news organizations began optimizing content for the

Web in earnest. The decisions being made today promise to have longstanding implications for

what news values are and aren't manifested in emerging news presentation formats.

Two forces are pushing and pulling at traditional journalistic values. The first force is the

nature of the Web medium itself. The Web's low barriers to use, bridging of time and space,

powerful organizational capabilities and transparent nature have blurred the line between

producers and consumers and allowed them to monitor and communicate with one another more

intimately than ever before. The second force is the economic effect all of this creates — both in

regard to the disruptions it causes for existing business models and the opportunities it creates for

new ones.

New medium, new economics

Perhaps the most fundamental effect the Web has had on news organizations is the

fragmentation of their audiences. The Web's abundant content — made possible by the low

barriers to entry and ease of distribution — includes substitutes — portals, blogs, aggregators —

and alternatives — niche content not readily available offline — would-be news consumers are

determining are more deserving of their media time.

The prevalence of choice, combined with the ability to track what users' choices using

Web analytics software, puts pressure on news organizations to cater to user preferences —

regardless of whether these preferences align with traditional news values like timeliness,

balance, enterprise and quality. To attract and retain visitors, outlets may be tempted to give

more prominent play to softer stories like entertainment and odds news proven to reliably get
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clicks, Curtain, Dougall and Mersey (2007) found. The editor of one of the more successful and

more journalistically respected online upstarts, MinnPost, acknowledged giving in to pressure "to

do more of what gets read, and less of what doesn't," but only up to a certain point (Kramer,

2009). Even though he knows that sex, crime and advice articles would up his site's page views,

Joel Kramer said he does not run them. This, he said, attracts more serious-minded users, but

even they prefer several shorter stories over longer, more in-depth ones, speaking to the

information overload the Web creates and the clunkiness of viewing large amounts of

information on a screen.

Catering to users' preference for chunked content, as the snippet storytelling that's

emerged on the Web is often called, dramatically increased traffic on MTV News' Web site

(Shields, 2009). Shortening stories, breaking apart longer videos and publishing "fascinating

nuggets" from longer stories as individual pieces preceded a more than 1 million year-over-year

increase in unique video streams, a MTV executive told trade magazine Mediaweek.

MTV News relied upon human editors' insight into their audience's preferences in order

to generate site visits. Staff cuts and increasingly sophisticated technology, however, are

popularizing the use of automated aggregation software. Once of the most progressive of such

aggregators is Canadian startup Thoora. Thoora seeks to differentiate itself in the growing

audience sentiment field by tracking exclusively news, tracking individual articles instead of

topics and, most provocatively, by making an earnest attempt to measure quality in addition to

popularity (Benkoil, 2010). It aims to measure quality based on grammar, spelling and sites'

authority, among other factors. CEO Mike Lee, who noted that human editors do supplement

Thorra's intelligence, envisions the software objectifying a wide range of newsroom decisions,

from story placement to how resources are allocated to cover a breaking event.

The algorithms employed by aggregators like Thorra borrow directly from search

engines. Measuring authority, for example, is staple of search engine logic. Packaging news in an
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SEO-friendly manner is another way news outlets seek to maximize their audiences. This can

drive a host of decisions, such as adding relevant keywords to headlines originally written for

print, choosing JavaScript or CSS over Flash-based interactivity and linking out to other popular

news sites and blogs. Frequently updating a site is another behavior search engines reward. This

is among the reasons news websites are enthusiastic about topic pages. Google's take on topic

pages, called Living Stories, allow users to access several articles at a single url, pushing them

higher in search results than they would appear if those articles resided only on their own

individual pages (Pérez-Peña, 2009).

Mobile, which connects users with news anywhere, anytime but on a teeny-tiny screen,

adds a whole new set of challenges and opportunities for news organizations to respond to. Even

more so than the Web in general, mobile may require journalists to reinvent the wheel (Emmett,

2008). Given mobile's youth, news companies must be cognizant of the preferences of

trendsetting early adopters, while also not overreacting to them. Mobile audiences are growing

too quickly for news organizations to draw any definite conclusions about their tastes. Case in

point, BlackBerry users issued devices and services by their employers comprise a

disproportionate percentage of the current mobile market. What business people want isn't

necessarily what everybody else wants.

Adjusting to the trends outlined above requires meeting consumers where they are. This

is the idea behind The Associated Press’s News Registry. The service, which recently emerged

from beta, represents a potential breakthrough for news organizations to promote and monetize

their content as it organically spreads across the Web (Fitzgerald, 2010). If successful, it could

encourage alternative forms of storytelling independent of an outlet's traditional Web site.

That the website, the property that news organizations have been trying to rebuild their

business models around, might not play as prominent a role as long assumed must be frustrating

for companies, especially those still coming to grips with the broader changes. Even though it
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helps explain legacy media's difficulty monetizing online information, outlets are unlikely to like

anymore Google's assertion that newspapers never made much money from news (Schonfeld,

2010). Google is of course interested in deflecting blame many cast on it and its Google News

service for the industry's decline, but, by pulling data from authoritative sources and by tracing

trends back to before Google was even an idea, it makes a convincing case. Newspapers, its chief

economist said, make their money from "special interest sections on topics such as Automotive,

Travel, Home & Garden, Food & Drink, and so on" whose subjects today’s niche websites cover

with greater breadth and depth.

The Google of the dial-up era, AOL, meanwhile, is taking a very Google-like data-driven

approach to its rapidly growing news division. Its leveraging the capabilities of man and machine

by staffing up — known to most as a content aggregator, it's quietly amassed a staff of more than

500 full-time reporters and editors, whom it insulated from a recent round of staffing cuts — and

instituting a culture in which those employees fold Web analytics into every facet of their

decision making (MacMillan, 2010). AOL is wallpapering its newsrooms with metrics data,

developing custom software showing what's popular on its network and elsewhere and even

considering profit sharing for reporters whose stories boost traffic.

Advertising sales reps, as well as advertisers themselves, of course, are as interested in

analytics data as editorial employees. The specificity and robustness of Web analytics data mean

advertisers might finally be able to figure out which half of their budgets they're wasting. Like so

many areas of technology, however, the absence of standards has complicated an already

complicated transition. For newspapers, quantifying their audience used to be comically simple.

They had to report only one number — circulation — and they could report it themselves.

Online, advertisers and partners expect many different numbers — not necessarily agreeing on

their meaning or significance — and they want to track numbers themselves.

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Many commonly used metrics possess inherent flaws. Unique visitor counts, for example,

track computers, not people, over-representing someone who visits a site from three different

computers and under-representing those who visit sites on public computers. "Engagement," or

how users are interacting and spending time with content, is emerging as a more reliable

alternative, but there is no agreed upon way to measure it (Usher, 2009).

Negative effects on news values

Ways presenting news online has negatively affected traditional news values include a

reduction of quality when journalists are asked to do many tasks quickly, abusive user comments'

threat to reporter-source relationships and the erosion of editorial independence.

The breakneck speed of the online news environment is hands down the No. 1 complaint

from practitioners and their leaders. A 2008 Columbia Journalism Review editorial called on

journalists to slow down and "think before they post," pointing to stumbles by digital journalism

leader The Bakersfield Californian to make its point (“A question of velocity,” 2008). The

editorial suggests the paper shouldn't have been surprised when, after asking its court reporter to,

on top of her regular trial coverage, note potential video edit points and publish — without a

second person editing — blog posts as frequently as every 10 minutes, grammatical, spelling and

factual errors began creeping in. Less measurable, the editorial adds, was whether the reporter's

divided attention resulted in less nuanced reporting.

Surveys by the Project for Excellence in Journalism and by an independent researcher

echoed CJR's warnings about the dangers of the incredible shrinking news cycle.

The Project for Excellence in Journalism’s 2009 state of the industry survey revealed that

online journalists, despite being more optimistic than their print counterparts about journalism's

future, shared legacy journalists' concerns that "the Web is changing the fundamental values of

journalism — most for the worse" (Project for Excellence in Journalism, 2009). Speed was their
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No. 2 concern, behind the loosening of standards, though the report suggested that lower

standards are in part a strategy to keep up with the accelerated production cycle.

Many of the 48 U.S. newspaper professionals researcher Scott Reinardy interviewed

about how the Web is influencing journalism norms lamented top-down pressure to produce

shorter, more positive stories more quickly, and to tell them with new tools like blogs and video

they felt they weren't adequately trained on (Reinardy, 2010). Trying to do more with less, they

said, compromised all areas of their work. They reported factual errors, poorer writing and less

thorough sourcing.

The rapid pace of the new media world has been a boon for one of modern journalism's

oldest storytelling formats: the inverted pyramid. This is both because the structure — in which

information is organized in descending order of importance, for the most part, independent of

other relationships — was invented to cover breaking news and because it generally requires less

writing and editing time than other formats. At first glance, this might seem like a positive for

today’s audiences. However, research by Wise, Bolls, Myers and Sternadori (2009) has shown

that information delivered via the non-linear form can be difficult for readers to process. One

researcher called it "one of the most unstable architectural forms the mind can conceive." The

human mind has a much easier time with linear narratives, as they mimic the way we naturally

perceive and communicate information about events. Original research inspired by this past work

found that an article's format not only affected how well news consumers process details in the

article itself but also in multimedia paired with the article. Researchers concluded that videos

with a lot of information not included in the corresponding article should be matched with

narrative pieces while videos that are primarily supplemental and mostly repeat information

contained in the story are OK to attach to inverted pyramid pieces.

Ironically, workers who underutilize new media tools out of a fear they will undermine

traditional news values can end up doing just that by producing lesser journalism than they could
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had they been using these tools, journalism lecturer An Nguyen wrote, taking American and

Australian outlets to task for what he characterized as embarrassing lack of innovation on their

Web sites (Nguyen, 2008). Traditional media isn't innovating, he said, because decision makers

view new technology as threat, not an opportunity, leading them to devote precious resources on

either how to retard it or on how to shape it to fit old models. As a result, Nguyen concluded,

online news presentations have underutilized the continuous information, interactive and

multimedia capabilities of the Web.

A less obvious drawback to presenting news online is the damage aggressive user

comments can do to sources' integrity — and, consequently, reporter's integrity with sources.

The reporter-source relationship is the foundation journalism is built on. The entire enterprise

depends on sources' confidence that what's published about them will represent them fairly. If

sources lose this confidence, we all lose.

A recent Washington Post blog post explained how reader comments can in a few clicks

burn bridges reporters spend weeks building. A reluctant source, a debt collector, one of the few

in his industry to even consider speaking on the record, and his colleagues were vilified in

comments, leading the source to swear off ever speaking to a reporter again (Davenport, 2010).

The reporter who wrote the story blogged about the obligation journalists feel to protect sources

from "an outfall that might result from agreeing to go on the record." That's now harder for them

to do. More ominously, there's the potential that the threat of harassing comments will

discourage would-be sources from ever talking in the first place.

Positive effects on news values

Ways presenting news online has positively affected traditional news values include

creating a virtually unlimited newshole that can accommodate a greater diversity of viewpoints,

demanding ingenuity in a way a push-model, 20-plus-percent profit-margin industry just couldn't

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and by providing a quantitative check on journalists pack mentality — a mindset where often the

primary reason for covering a story is that the other guy's covering it.

The Web's virtually unlimited newshole is one of the reasons for the reader comment

issue described in the last section. Comments are essentially an extension of the dialogue that's

taken place on newspaper opinion pages for decades, only in near-real time, and among many

more people. Unlike opinion pages, the available space for comments is virtually infinite,

removing a convenient excuse for not publishing vile, combative, off-topic or just plain

uninteresting viewpoints. But there are advantages to this as well. Despite Web users'

aforementioned tendency to gravitate toward soft news stories, when it comes to serious topics,

they actively seek out hard news (Curtain et al., 2007), and, as you might expect on the World

Wide Web, they are more likely to check out international stories (Maier, 2010). This, combined

with the Web's gigantic newshole, is encouraging. It leaves open the possibility that news

websites can serve both publishers' bottom lines and the public interest.

Reinardy, the researcher who interviewed U.S. journalists about their changing industry,

got an earful about what they felt was going wrong (one disillusioned veteran broke into tears)

— perhaps in part because his sample was subject to self-selection — but did hear from some

about what they saw as going right.

One 36-year-old city editor said the Web is forcing long overdue changes. Yesterday's

newspapers, he said, had "more people and more time and not enough imagination" (Reinardy,

2010). Another editor observed that important local "stories that would traditionally be buried

inside the newspaper have floated their way to front page because of their electronic popularity."

Others added that new tools like video, rather than distracting journalists from their core work, as

some suggest, in actuality improve it by promoting more creative storytelling across all

platforms.
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Audience sentiment tools like Thoora, meanwhile, can help news organizations do more

with less by automating work humans can't do or can’t do efficiently and by exposing biases in a

news organizations’ coverage.

It's dangerous to suggest that computer algorithms could replace the expertise news

editors spend decades developing (though this, essentially, is what Google News and other

automated aggregators are attempting), but Thoora and tools like it could certainly supplement

editors' work, especially more tedious tasks outside their core duties. Consider screening user-

generated content, for instance. Separating obviously shoddy submissions from stuff an outlet

would even begin to consider publishing is a time consuming process. If audience sentiment

tools can successfully measure quality, they could perform this first round of evaluations.

Furthermore, despite their best attempts at balanced coverage that reflects the values of

their community, especially in a 24-7 news environment, it's easy for news organizations to miss

the forest for the trees. Individual news organizations and the news media industry as a whole are

guilty of this, regularly leaving audiences' scratching their heads asking "Why are they covering

this?" Audience sentiment tools, Thoora's CEO suggested, could help news outlets spot

differences between what the news cycle deems important and what audiences do (Benkoil,

2010).

A final benefit is that interactive pieces lend themselves well to narrative storytelling,

which, as previously mentioned, research shows are easier for users to process (Wise et al.,

2009).

Discussion

The positive and negative effects online news presentation is having on traditional news

values raise or relate to several important issues worth exploring further.

The first issue is the maturation of a news ecosystem in which the lines between news

producers and consumers and between the raw materials of news and finished products are
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becoming increasingly blurrier. On one hand, this means users can uncover, advance and

promote stories for news organizations. On the other hand, it means users can steer their

messages around the mainstream media filter and publicly criticize coverage they don't like. The

American Press Institute's Newspaper Next business model discusses the ecosystem. It goes as

far as saying that newspapers are upholding their obligation of informing their communities only

if, on top of effectively presenting their own content, they are facilitating opportunities for users

to inform them as well as other users (American Press Institute, 2008). In this framework, news

organizations can never be certain as to exactly how end users will experience their news, let

alone choreograph the experience.

Hard data on the increasingly participatory nature of news were released this spring by

the Pew Internet & American Life Project. "Understanding the Participatory News Consumer"

found that for all the effort put into getting users to come to them — from how outlets structure

information on their websites to off-site marketing efforts — users often access news in a

serendipitous manner, being forwarded it, linked to it, or tweeted about it by a subclass of hyper-

engaged users Pew calls "participators." (Pew Internet & American Life Project, 2010).

Successful news organizations, this suggests, will target these diehards, move out of their push

communication comfort zone and leverage the Web's powers of spreadability.

The second issue is whether the Web is actually shaping users' preferences or simply

exposing long-held beliefs. For example, a 2005 survey of what stories users favored on

Yahoo!'s news portal revealed user preferences not dissimilar from those manifested in earlier,

pre-Web readership studies (Curtain et al., 2007). Editors tended to ignore this data, however,

making "new judgments based not on research but on industry trends or 'truisms.' As the

researchers astutely highlight, Internet users, unlike newspaper readers or broadcast television

viewers, "access only content in which they are interested." This, the competition for an
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increasingly fragmented audience and the speed and specificity of Web analytics tools are

perhaps merely making users' tastes more difficult to ignore.

The third issue is the stubbornness of the status quo. A 2007 poll of online editors at

newspapers showed them to be, on big-picture stuff, little more progressive than their print

counterparts, according to Gladney, Shapiro and Castaldo (2007). Online editors assigned low

priority to community relevance and interactivity criteria, or, "precisely those that are putatively

associated with the major strengths and more revolutionary possibilities of Web news." There are

at least two possible explanations for this. The first is that older "digital migrants" who toe the

company line are more likely to end up in leadership positions than young "digital natives" who

challenge it. The second is how closely journalists' link their personal and professional

identities.

The fourth issue is the extent all news media — online, broadcast, cable and other

newspapers — rely on newspapers, either for story ideas or for wire copy. While Google news

might be a more popular news source than any newspaper, it gets most of its content from

newspapers and produces none of its own. A recent Newspaper Research Journal article

quantifies this phenomenon, showing that while online news may be presented differently, a

good deal of it is originally produced by print journalists. A 2007 content analysis of

MSNBC.com, CNN.com, Google News, Yahoo! News, AOL and daily newspaper top stories

revealed that wire copy — which, especially in the case of Associated Press stories, usually

stems from newspaper reporting — comprised 60 percent of Web sites' top stories (Maier, 2010).

In addition, most news discussed or linked to on blogs and social media uses mainstream media

as its original source.

The fifth issue is that as newspapers close, downsize and buyout older workers into early

retirement, the journalistic norms new workers traditionally absorb from older colleagues might

never be picked up (Reinardy, 2010). Like most industries, journalism was already due for an
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exodus of baby boomer workers. Confounding that, many of the veterans still around enjoy less

influence than their predecessors become of their technological illiteracy.

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