Comparing News Framing in Print and Online

Bremen.
The final speaker in this session of the ECREA 2010 ‘Doing Global Media Studies’ pre-conference is Élisabeth Le, whose interest is in a framework for comparing print and online news media. A first step in this could be to compare newspaper front pages and online news homepages. How do they macro-frame the news – and what are the differences between the print and online versions of the same newspapers, or across different countries?

This can be examined using the concept of substantive frames (focussing on issues/events or political actors); studying language, picture, the combination of language and picture, and layout for each. Layout, for example, points to the underlying information hierarchy, from this, it is possible to assess the importance of specific news items and other functionality.

This may also relate to the news organisation’s self-perception, its attitude towards its audience, and other factors, then, but how strongly these factors are correlated is not always clear (and presumably depends on the extent to which especially the online layout has been thought through at all).

Additionally, online content, and formatting, may also change more frequently than is common in print; this makes comparisons more problematic (a print headline remains the top story for a day; an online headline might be replaced more quickly by breaking news).