Freezing the Flow of Online News

This article may be used for research, teaching and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution , reselling , loan or sub-licensing, systematic supply or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. The publisher does not give any warranty express or implied or make any representation that the contents will be complete or accurate or up to date. The accuracy of any instructions, formulae and drug doses should be independently verified with primary sources. The publisher shall not be liable for any loss, actions, claims, proceedings, demand or costs or damages whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with or arising out of the use of this material. According to previous research, two characteristics of online news as opposed to traditional news are interactivity and immediacy. However, most research in this area has focused on the news site-level of analysis, and there are only a few studies on how interactivity and immediacy affect online news on the news story-level of analysis. The main reason for this appears to be that the very nature of online news makes observation by traditional research methods, such as quantitative content analysis, problematic. Against this background, the overall purpose of this paper is to explore methodological approaches for the study of interactivity and immediacy on the news story-level of online news. The paper develops a three-pronged strategy for freezing the flow of online news to enable systematic content analyses of interactivity and immediacy, and tests this strategy in a comparative analysis of the online news sites Guardian.co.uk in Britain and Aftonbladet.se in Sweden. Introduction Since the introduction of the World Wide Web in the mid-1990s, the media environment and the conditions that journalism operates under have changed dramatically. This has challenged both traditional notions of what journalism is and research on news journalism. For example, traditional news journalism is characterized by a clear demarcation between news producers and news consumers, and news content is distributed at predictable and recurring points in time. In contrast, online news production is set in a digital environment, which influences news production processes as well as news content. Thus, in contrast to news in traditional newspapers, news stories on websites never leave the producer entirely (Jensen, 1998, p. 191), which means that journalists can continue to work on, revise, or add to the news stories even after they purportedly have been published (Manovich, …