Changes in News Report Formats in US Newspapers in Recent Years

Cardiff.
The next speaker at Future of Journalism 2009 is Kevin Barnhurst, whose focus is on reporting form(at)s on US newspaper sites. News reports are expressive of historical processes, forms of production, and other factors, and historical changes in radio, TV, and print reports can readily be observed; this work can also be translated to the online environment, of course. US news has been redefined in the 20th century, from denotative (factual) reporting to interpretative and opinion-based analysis; this is an ideological process reflecting the way that power to control societal discussions has moved towards journalists in the 20th century.

Kevin's work compares data on reporting forms from 2001 and 2005; during this time, the news got shorter and became driven by the Web in a more substantial way. Around 2000, there were suggestions that technology would change news, but this was always a questionable argument as social processes also drive our use of technology; since then, a sense has emerged that Web capabilities in newspaper and other Websites have increased, but without attributing this to technology as a driving factor alone.

The study compares three newspapers - the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, and the Portland Oregonian - to identify changes in news forms; from 2001 to 2005, the percentage of stories placed on the home, secondary, or tertiary pages of these sites increased massively; nearly 50% of all stories are now placed on the home pages, and topicsal sectioning has decreased substantially (the least so at the New York Times, incidentally). This also means that users need to click or search less to get to the stories they want, of course.

In 2005, there were three times more crime stories on the home pages; employment stories were comparatively deeply buried. The mean number of clicks to get to any given story changed so that stories were three quarters of a page closer to the home page on average; on this measure, accident stories have moved closest to the front page. Also, it was possible to measure how many pages a story was distributed across; here, the number of pages increased (perhaps to create more page impressions, and thus, advertising revenue).

Typography was more limited, but there were more images than in 2001, especially for accident stories. There were also 24% more links, but a substantial decrease in email links for reporters, with an increase in user commenting functionality. Production processes also played a role here: newswire to staff story ratios were relatively static, but fewer follow-up reports were published for either category. Many online stories remained very similar to the print stories, especially for politics; one sixth of online stories did not appear in print.

So, overall, online form is now again more similar to 19th century forms (less selectivity, more miscellany), which assumed a more omnivorous news reader who is clicking more often (which also helps with page impressions and advertising revenues, of course); content has drifted more towards sensationalism (more risk and danger, and less deliberation), and practice shows a shift to more shielded journalists (with more managed links and less direct access).

So perhaps these observations indicate that there is a bifurcation happening here, into some news organisations circling the wagons around their key principles to uphold 'quality' journalism, and others pursuing larger audiences through more sensationalism.

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