Download the eBook (8.25 MB) - ECREA Thematic Sections

Diversity of Journalisms. Proceedings of ECREA/CICOM Conference, Pamplona, 4-5 July 2011
to their professional identities; and the challenges posed by user-authored content to
the jurisdictional space that news workers occupy as gatekeepers of information.
(Mitchelstein &Boczkowski, 2009, p. 570).
Gate keeping has been considered the foremost marker of occupational jurisdiction in
journalism. However, scholars have argued that this jurisdictional claim might be
challenged by the grooving presence of users as content producers in the new media
environment (Burns, 2008). The demise of the gate-keeping role could lead
audiences to challenge the authority of journalism, as Lowrey and Anderson (2005, p.
9) found in a survey of news consumers in the Baton Rouge area in the USA. More
than two-thirds of the respondents sought news on non-news websites, and nearly
half believed they could easily become journalists themselves. The authors suggest
that these findings signal future questioning of ‘the ability of the occupation to define
the already fuzzy boundaries of what constitutes news’.
Studies about user-authored content have promoted an understanding of the factors
that affect one of the most fundamental shifts in the architecture of contemporary
media systems: the redrawing of the boundaries between the production and
consumption. The transformed information architecture of online environments and
the increased options for audiences to become content producers provide new type
division between production and consumption of journalistic media and publicity.
A common empirical strategy in studying online journalism is a structural approach to
the news websites. Another research strategy shifts from their structure to the actual
content of the sites, usually comparing the print edition of a newspaper to its online
version. (Domingo, 2006, pp. 95-100). Van der Wurff and Lauf (2005) coordinated a
cross-national team of researchers in 2003 which analysed the biggest newspapers’
websites in 16 European countries. One interesting result of the study was that 70 per
cent of online news coincided with the print newspaper stories at the time.
Research questions
This PhD-study applies structural approach to the actual content of news websites.
The purpose is to examine different methods of news presentation online compared
to print media. The study scrutinizes two key dimensions: news values and the
structure of the news stories by combining quantitative and qualitative content
analysis.
The main research question of this study is: What are the main characteristic
features, news values and story structures used in online news presentation
compared to those used in print newspapers? Secondary research questions are: In
which ways and to what extent online journalism is a kind of transformation of
journalism in the ‘old’ media, concerning styles, genres and technical journalistic
elements? Is it possible to detect certain innovative elements that have emerged in
online journalism and if yes, what are they?
372