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Diversity of Journalisms. Proceedings of ECREA/CICOM Conference, Pamplona, 4-5 July 2011
3. A relative agreement is set up, concerning a central core aspects qhich give
quality to a website or online publication. Normally information architecture,
accessibility and visibility are considered.
4. As times change, we need to consider and propose new parameters, indicators,
guidelines and check points for every website typology or research purpose.
The tool
After reviewing all the different versions of the tool, from 2003 (as it was
proposed by Lluís Codina in the mentioned handbook) to the necessities of our current
project (2010-2012), we decided to maintain the three great parts of groups or original
criteria: content and information access; visibility and macronavigation; and usability,
but the list of concrete indicators was carefully revised, so that some of them were
eliminated –they were redundant or were not of application to online journalistic media,
since the tool was proposed to be applied to any kind of website- and some other
indicators were added, because from the proposal of the original tool in 2003 to our
days news applications, and especially the so called Web 2.0 have appeared.
One of our main goals is, precisely, to explain to which extent the analyzed
media are adapted to these new times, so a number of indicators about the use of the
new tools and services were added. The concrete indicators and it classification
appears in the tables with the results of the application of the tool in the second part of
2010 at the end of this paper.
Another part, on interactivity, was considered of kind importance, so it was
segregated from this proposal. Another paper presented by Lluís Codina and Javier
Díaz Noci to this ECREA Journalism Studies Conference 2011 explain the
development of the interactivity evaluation.
Qualification system
For every indicator or check point, we have considered at least three different
qualifications systems. The second one, as we explain later on, is converted from
absolute values –very different and dissimilar- to 1 to 4 scale, so the different parts of
the study could be converted to numeric values.
Symbol Explanation
0 | 1 Presence / ausence indicator. Value for summatory
N
Numerical result after measuring or applying a test. Base value for
a ranking once completed all the measures and tests for every
website we analyze, and converted to comparable scale before
using for sumatory.
0-3 In some cases . We have traed to reduce this cases to 0 | 1 binary
scale, decomposing the questions posed in this kinds of
parameters.
0 : Ausence of the evaluated funcionality.
1 : Functionality is present, but in a limited degree
2 : Funcionality preset with relatively broad options but able to be
strenghtened
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