website features of the top 100 circulation u.s. newspapers heather heater, anita ford, brad...
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Website Features of the Top 100 Circulation U.S. Newspapers
Heather Heater, Anita Ford, Brad Beckwith, Jeremy Lyons, Kris Miller and Bob Bergland
Missouri Western State University
Overview In 2006, The Bivings Group
conducted a study of the websites of the Top 100 circulation newspapers in the U.S.
The goal of our study was1) Update and compare their results with 2012 data2) Research the use of social media and other new features among the newspapers
3) Provide a baseline for future studies
Background Literature
First comprehensive studies of U.S. dailies done in 1997
• Peng et. al study of website design and features on 80 newspapers
• Kamerer and Bressers study of national vs local news on websites
• Shultz: Content analysis of features of 100 newspaper websites, stratified by size
Background LiteratureSome other key studies:Greer & Mensing’s 1997-2003
longitudinal study Huang et. al (survey, 2006) Sparks, Young & Darnell 2006—100
Canada media websites2006 Bivings Group—Top 100, Russial’s 2008 survey of 210
newspapers over 30,000 circulationBergland, et. al. 2008 analysis of 362
dailies
Methodology• Chose content analysis over survey
method• Largely repeated methodology of
Bivings Group 2006 study, with 3 main differences• 1) Used current list of Top 100 U.S.
newspapers, which has changed slightly since the list Bivings used
• 2) Used a two-pass system to aid in reliability of data
• 3) Expanded list of features from 14 to 36
Note: this paper only looks at MM/Interactivity; A future paper will examine social media/distribution
Methodology
Conducted pilot test of 10 sites to ensure inter-rater reliability (94%)
First pass was conducted in mid-October
Second pass was conducted one week after first pass, only adding features not seen on first pass, since there would be no way to verify that a feature wasn’t there before.
A total of 212 items were added in the second pass in the 3,600-item dataset (5.9%)
Results
Multimedia
Video-95% publish original video
Other Multimedia Features
Interactivity
Reader interaction:96% have comments
Other interactive: 96% have blogs
2006 vs 2012 Interactivity, Multimedia and Distribution Features
2006 vs 2012
2006 vs 2012 Interactivity
2006 vs 2012 Multimedia
Conclusions Interactivity has increased, with blogs
and comments after articles jumping the most and reaching almost 100%
Also not surprisingly, self-produced video has also almost reached the full saturation point
Tied in with comments and a gradual move toward paywalls, registration has also increased significantly, nearly tripling
Advances in Content Management Systems and the focus on the reader has resulted in features like Most Popular/Commented/Recommended to also nearly triple
Future ResearchAnalyze more distribution and
social media featuresBreak down data by ownership,
sizeFollow-up survey/interviews to
explain how/whyRepeat study in 4-5 years