On-line Newspapers and Genre Development on the World Wide Web

Lundberg, J. (2001): On-Line Newspapers and Genre Development on
the World-Wide-Web. In Proceedings of the 24th Information Systems
Research Seminar in Scandinavia, Ulvik, Norway, 505-518.

  On-line Newspapers and Genre
  Development on the World Wide Web
  Jonas Lundberg
  Department of Computer and Information Science, Linköpings Universitet, Linköping, Sweden
  Jonas.Lundberg@ida.liu.se

  Abstract. In this paper I describe a genre analysis for on-line newspapers, revealing
  how their mediating form affect news related activities. A repertoire of elements was
  developed during the analysis of three on-line newspapers, to describe them. It is a
  repertoire of content, information structure and interaction elements together with with
  a repertoire of mediationg roles. The analysis in terms of the repertoire of elements
  revealed that the papers support activities unsupported by the printed papers,
  constituting a genre development. The analysis suggest that the genre is still a variant
  of the newspaper. It revealed a cosiderable space for development of the genre,
  supporting novel news related activities. However, it also revealed some problems
  which must be overcome by the mediators, if the papers are developed along the
  suggested lines. Furthermore it revealed some problems when using these popular
  formats for other purposes at other sites, and some problems with their current
  treatment of the digital material.

  1 Introduction
  In this paper I describe a genre analysis revealing how the mediating form affects
  activities involving on-line newspapers. The form of an on-line newspaper is by
  necessity different from the printed edition since the medium is different. However, the
  content may still be the same, as printed text and images can be displayed on most
  media terminals. During the birth of the on-line newspapers, around 1994, newspaper
  content was indeed a selection of news from the printed editions. In 1999, the on-line
  edition was going towards a "live" scheme of publishing, presenting news continually

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(Eriksen & Ihlström, 2000). Some on-line newspapers now have huge audiences. This
means that their combination of content and structure is good, in some sense. I describe
the combination of structure and content of three on-line newspapers, thereby revealing
the consequences of altering the combination, or of using it for other purposes at other
sites.

2 Genre
Genre can refer to at least two things. First, it can refer to the common sense notion,
shared by producer and audience, used to find or produce more generic products. This
common sense notion of generic products is thus " . . . the meeting point between the
process of producing media materials and the process of using them" (Agre, 1998, p
81). Second, genre can refer to the more elaborate genre descriptions used, historically,
to a great extent in media studies. Lacey (2000) describes genre products as having a
common repertoire of elements. In movies, the elements are setting, characters,
iconography and style. Eriksen and Ihlström (2000) presents conceptual and
presentation elements for web newspapers. Using the repertoire of elements of a genre
will guarantee that the experienced audience gets what they expect. This causes
predictability, which helps understanding the media product, because in a sense, the
audience has already seen the movie, read the book, heard the song, etc. As this
understanding is based on experience, some product must come first and in some sense
be a non-genre product. However, generic products can be designed by combining the
elements of different genres, preserving some of the advantages of generic media
products, while creating something new.
    Sometimes, copying an element from another genre is not a good idea. Manning
(1998) describes a case where the lead paragraph of technical information is presented
using the journalistic narrative style, answering questions about who does what, when,
where and how, rather than the technical style questions of how a product works or
how it is put together and why. Manning argues that this happened because of the
popularity of news sites, and the tendency of authors to copy sucessful formats
    Altering the information structure of a media product might change its genre. As an
example, Crowston and Williams (1999) argues that taking the content from a
reference manual and imposing a strictly sequential structure of chapters would change
its genre, since it would not support the activity of looking up random pieces of
information. As a less drastic example, they argue that the freqently-asked-questions
genre is reproduced when linking is restricted to tie the document together. The genre
is altered when links supports activities such as navigating the document or reaching
other information sources.

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    These two examples emphasise two important defining elements of genres, while at
the same time illustrate that a genre analysis may focus on different things. First, he
same content can be placed in different information structures, sometimes resulting in
different genres. Second, to change the content structure, the content must be
reformulated. In both examples the question is wheter the structure supports the
purpose of the product. Using purpose and structure to define genres is common (i.e.
Lacey, 2000; Yates, Orlikowski & Rennecker, 1997; Bergquist & Ljugberg, 1999).

3 A repertoire of elements for on-line newspapers
To reveal how the mediating form affects the activities involving on-line newspapers, I
propose a suitable repertoire of elements. I propose a repertoire of content, information
structure and interaction elements, together with a repertoire of mediating roles. These
will be presented in the following section, and used for the subsequent analysis.

3.1 Content elements
In an on-line newspaper, the content elements are expected to be similar to the contents
of the printed edition. The content types of printed papers are parts, pages, stories, and
articles, lead paragraphs, headlines and images. Deviations found in the analysis will
form part of the difference between the printed and on-line editions. This difference
may be evidence of a development of the genre. For this analysis, I restrict the analysis
to recognisable content types. An analysis of content form would constitute a research
project on its own, and could possibly reveal further differences between on-line and
printed editions. The only sense in which I include content form, is that it should be
recognisable as belonging to the category. Toms and Campbell (1999) demonstrate that
form alone may convey enough information to categorise information as belonging to a
genre. As I in this analysis focus on content with the purpose of communicating news, I
do not include advertisements1, for example.
    The content elements are equivalent to three of the four presentation elements in
Eriksen and Ihlström (2000). Their presentation elements are related to page layout.
They talk about hard composites as a chunk of headlines packed together. The soft
composite is a chunk of lead paragraphs with headlines and sometimes images. Their
article element is equivalent to mine, and their structure element, finally, is replaced
with my information structure and interaction elements. In my view, the hard and soft
composite elements are less useful for an analysis of this kind than a description of the
actual content types.

1 For a discussion of on-line advertisment genres, see for example Fortanet, Palmer & Posteguillo (1998).

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3.2 Information structure elements
I propose four information structure elements. The framework, network, search space
and flow. A framework supports navigation of the site, and is a relatively static
structure, which the user can learn or comprehend, and then use to navigate to desired
parts. How to construct frameworks for static information is well covered in the
information architecture literature (Rosenfeld & Morville, 1998). The framework might
be explicitly presented to the user in the form of a menu, or implicitly, by connecting
hypertexts in a flow to a certain part. For example, a part of an on-line newspaper page
might exclusively present news headlines for international news, and present that
section together with each article.
    The network is a linked structure of related information, usually implemented as
hypermedia. The design of networks is covered in the hypermedia litterature (Pawan &
Helander, 1997). Networks cannot be implemented in a printed newspaper, except as
references to page numbers, while on-line papers depend on them. For example, they
are used to connect the parts of articles, such as when clicking on a headline may bring
the entire article for viewing. In this way they support the reading of articles in a non-
sequential fashion. They can also be used to support, for example, the finding of related
stories inside or outside the paper.
    Flows most closely resembles what we encounter when turning on a televison set.
They support the passive consumption of content, where the user must attend to
information, but does not have to actively search for or demand each item, thus
reducing the need for interacting with the system. On-line newspapers use a variety of
flows, as is evident from the analysis. They may be present as for example, a flow of
headlines, or a moving video image.
    The flow element is also present in Eriksen and Ihlström (2000), as a conceptual
element, but it seems that their conceptual elements are all different streams. In
principle any editing and timing principle could be used for streams, from the
personalised continous stream of a favourite topic to the edited stream of news
appearing in a newspaper section each day in the printed edition. Therefore it seems
premature to limit the kinds of possible streams to five, although these are sufficient for
describing the on-line newspapers in their study.
    Search spaces, common on the webb, such as http://www.google.com are well
known in HCI, and have the well known problems of underflow (not finding enough)
and overflow (finding too much). They support finding information when the user
knows exactly what is desired. It's main problem might be that the search space on the
web often is made up of keywords, which are ambiguos, frequently causing underflow
or overflow. A common design mistake is either to omit a gateway to the search space,
or to hide it, forcing the user to search for the search function.

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3.3 Interaction elements
The interaction elements2 of a digital product are what allow interaction with the
product, as compared to layout, which supports perceiving the product. Thus the
interaction elements are part of the layout of a page, together with the content elements.
The discipline of human-computer interaction (HCI), with its history of analysis and
design of office systems, provides a way of describing interface elements for computer
programs (Nielsen, 1993). Combined with hypermedia vocabulary, it is suitable for
describing interaction elements on web sites.
    The batch file, beginning with the oldest interaction method, lets us specify a
number of commands, and then execute them all at once. On the web, the batch
concept gets slightly obscure. On the production side there are batch files doing all
kinds of things, but on the audience side, there appears to be very few batch files. I
cannot, for instance, easily program my browser to fetch and display a sequence of
pages, or at least, I haven't seen any use of that functionality. Some pages, however,
contain information from other web sites, for example one page can display the main
news of several newspapers, refreshing the contents with a push of the reload button,
doing a batch job of collecting information from several sites.
    Command languages are uncommon on the web. However, they could provide a
convienent way of interacting with news, using spoken commands. The most similar
device on the web is the search function, but as search is just one command, it should
not be considered a command language except when it can be enterend in a multi-
purpose field such as the location field3 in current browsers.
    Forms are instead present everywhere on the web, encapsulating commands like
subscribing to web sites, using search engines, and sending web based email. Forms
could for example be used to request on-line newspaper parts, instead of using a menu,
as is the current standard.
    Menus are also used everywhere on the web and in the browser, to move between
positions in the framework. In the browser, the most intresting menu is the bookmarks
menu, where each user creates a personalised set of web pages. On web pages, menus
appear in a variety of shapes and colors, with the left hand menu as a common
example.
    Direct manipulation is not used to a great extent on the web. In its pure form, data
are made visible as objects, which the user manipulates. In office systems, objects are
manipulated using a pointer conneted to a mouse, in VR systems sometimes by using
gloves, and in computer games often by using a joystick. On web pages, data are not

2 Here, the vocabulary of genre and HCI clashes, since in HCI these interaction elements are refered to as
  interaction styles.
3 The location field in netscape 4.7 can in fact be used for searching, by entering keywords instead of a
  location.

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represented as objects to be manipulated directly, instead forms are used. Direct
manipulation should not be confused with WIMP (windows, icons, menus, pointer)
interfaces, as these are normally used to implement web browsers. The difference is
that interface components, and not neccesarily data, are seen as objects which can be
manipulated with interaction devices, for example buttons on a web page, that can be
"pushed" using the mouse.
    Hypermedia is in widespread use on the WWW. In hypermedia, objects are
conceived as nodes related to each other by association (Pawan & Helander, 1997). The
links are often presented as a word or phrase, or a part of an image, which when
selected brings forth the related information. Hyperlinks embody networks, as desribed
in section 3.2. They should not be confused with menus, which are often presented
using the same devices, such as clickable text.

3.4 Mediating roles
The roles in the process of information exchange are called mediating roles, occupied
by agents who also have social roles. These mediating roles emerge from mass media
theory (i.e. McQuail, 2000). The consumer is the one who is on the mass end of mass
communication or the recipient of interpersonal messages. For example, with a flow of
information, consumption is made easier if the flow is presented so that the user can
find the desired information by just monitoring one window if the speed of the flow fits
the cycles of consumption. For information services, this means that several flows with
different speeds might have to be presented, to meet the differing cycles of
consumption of the audience. From a media perspective, a sizeable audience is often
demanded to keep advertisements on the pages, which in turn is needed to afford the
service in the first place.
    Furthermore there is the gate-keeper, deciding what in the incoming material will be
presented in the flow, included in the network, added to the framework or put into the
search space. The demands on the gate-keeper increases as the incoming flow
increases. This becomes a problem in on-line discussions where the moderator (gate-
keeper) of the discussion gets too much work when the discussion gets going.
    In journalism, there is also the source, which is where the journalist gets parts of the
story. The source can be an individual, another news agency or information source. In
on-line newspapers the audience is often invited as sources, to state their opinion about
something. The citizen then gets the role of storyteller, which is traditionally a
priviliged role reserved for journalists. Usually space is create for readers to tell their
stories, and this is something which is widely used in on-line newspapers. The
storyteller has the advantage of setting the slant of the story, to choose the perspective
from where to tell the story. The editor decides where in the flow, the framework, the
network to put the information, and what keywords to use to position it in the search

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space. For news, more important informaiton will be given more space, and be more
visible to the reader. Sometimes, the most recent information will be given more space.
The validator, finally, checks the information to see that it is correct, something which
is very important for newspapers, to maintain their credibility.
    Social roles can be that of an interest group, where the individual speaks not as a
citizen, but as a member of a particular group. Normally on-line newspapers allows
people to tell stories as citizens or to be sources as interest groups. The exception
would be special debate areas where interest groups may speak, and which are
presented in the on-line edition as well as in the printed edition. The individual can also
be part of a media house, which many journalists are. As gate owners, the media house
can set the policies of what social roles should be given what mediating roles, a very
powerful position. They can also decide what slants stories should have and what news
value they shall be given. With the introduction of computers there is also artificial
intelligence, which ranges from simple batch programs to advanced reasoning
machines. They have a very special social status as they are software, but still can have
mediating roles such as gate-keeping, selecting specified content from a stream, or
editors, putting that content somewhere for the users.

4 Genre analysis
While developing the repertoire of elements for on-line newspapers, a genre analysis of
three Swedish newspapers was conducted. The newspapers analysed were
www.Corren.se, www.DN.se and www.Epressen.se. These three cases were selected
due to their sizeable audiences, which means the content and structure is good, in some
sense. Corren (Östgöta Correspondenten) represents a local newspaper, DN (Dagens
Nyheter) represents a national newspaper, and Expressen represents an evening
newspaper. The selection was random, in a sense, because there were other newspapers
available, but for the present analysis, three papers were sufficient.
    The focus on news means that other sections of the papers, such as marketplaces,
were not included in the analysis. The selection of news materials in the papers was the
first page, including all pages reached from the first page. This represents an audience
skimming the paper, reading the main news, or reaching for a different part of the
paper.
    To avoid influences from fluctations in the paper, random or season based,
recommentdations given by Hansen, Cottle, Negrine and Newbold (1998) were
followed. This means that, first, seven days in one week was analysed, then another
seven days from seven different weeks, distributed over all days in the week. To select
several days, instead of just one, is neccesary to differentiate static structures from

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dynamic structures. Furthermore, quantity is neccesary to be able to analyse how the
dynamic news represent the paper as a whole.

5 Results and discussion
From the results of the study, I argue in the following section, that there is evidence of
a genre of on-line newspapers, supporting different activities than printed papers. The
results suggest that a number of potentially important activities are unsupported. There
is also evidence that the papers treat the digital material differently and sometimes
incorrect. Finally, the results suggest that the structures are dependent on a particular
set of mediating roles, which may cause problems when altering the current designs or
using them elsewhere.

5.1 Reading the news
The texts support the same reading styles as normal newspaper texts, as they use
headlines, lead paragraphs and then full texts. There is almost no news in other
modalities, such as video/audio. The use of images does influence readability for
readers connected to slow networks, and the use of images varies between the papers
(Table 1). All articles in the papers are presented vertically in one node, rather than
being horizontally split into several nodes. At the level of interaction, this demands that
the reader scrolls down to read long texts, rather than following hypertext links to read
the full text of articles which doesn't fit on one screen page. This choice doesn't seem to
have any particular influence on the readability of articles (Oostendorp, & Nimwegen,
1998). Thus the on-line news content elements clearly originate in the newspaper
genre, supporting the same reading style as paper texts.
    Expressen and DN supports the new activities of finding related articles on other
sites. Furthermore, they sometimes support finding related information published at the
same time. This is no development, but a way of achieving what a printed paper
achieves by placing related articles next to each other. The support for finding the
published background of a story constitutes a development, since this is not supported
in printed editions. (Table 1). At the level of interaction structure, the inhouse-articles,
discussions and external material are connected in a network from the article as the
main node. As expected, this is implemented as hypertext headlines at the interface
level. In this way, including external sources and older articles in the network,
supporting new activities, constitutes a development of the newspaper genre.

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  Newspaper           Use of images             Internal links      External links
  Corren              1.8 %                     0%                  0%
  DN                  21 %                      31 %                4%
  Expressen           63 %                      68 %                45 %

                                               Table 1

    The usage of flow elements is prominent in the papers. On the first page, several
flows are present. The content of these flows misrepresent the parts of the paper, as
news from some sections are almost never in the first page flows. For example, in
Corren 22% of the introductions leads to articles in the Linköping part of the paper. In
DN 35% of the introductions in the first flow (Figure 3, B1) and 30% of the headlines
in the second flow (Figure3, B2) leads to the national news section, whereas in the third
flow (Figure 3, B3), 38% of the introductions leads to the culture section. In Expressen,
48% of the introductions in the first position (Figure 1, B1), leads to articles in the
national news position. The implication of this is that more pages with mixed flows
could be present, to avoid forcing the reader to look at each of these other sections to
see if something new has happened. The papers do not support personalised news
flows, but forces the reader either to use the present flow, or to browse all other parts
manually. Another implication is that the flows are parts of the framework, connected
to the parts of the paper.

  Framework A 1               Flow B 1                           Flow C
  Table of contents           Short introductions                Advertisements
  Menu                        Hypertext
                              --------------
                              Flow B 2 (fast)
                              Headings & Headlines
                              Hypertext

                             Figure 1. Expressen.se, first page

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  Framework A 1              Flow B 1                           Flow C1
  Table of contents          Short introductions                Advertisements
  Menu                       Hypertext                          Hypermedia
  -------                                                       -----------
  Flow A 2                                                      Framework C2
  Opinion poll                                                  Advertisement
  Radio buttons                                                 Menu

                              Figure 2. Corren.se, first page

 Framework A1                Flow B 1                           Flow C 1
 Heding                      Short introductions                Opinion poll
 Menu item                   Hypertext                          Radio buttons
 +                           --------------                     --------
 Flow A1                     Flow B 2 (fast)                    Flow C2
 Headings                    Headings & Headlines               Advertisements
 Hypertext                   as Hypertext                       Hypermedia
                             ----------------
 Framework + Flows           Flow B 3
 A2-A5                       Headings & Headlines
 Same as A1                  as Hypertext

                                Figure 3. DN.se, first page

    The framework element, implemented as menus, or as just argued, flows, is used
differently in the papers to facilitate the reading of news beloning to a particular topic.
For example, on the first page, DN has five flows in the A position connected to
different parts of the paper (Figure 3, A1-A5), while Expressen and Corren uses a
menu in the same position (Figure 1, A; Figure 2, A)
    Reading the news from a section of the paper, is supported differently by the papers.
As just implied, parts may be reached either using menus or by reading articles
belonging to a part. DN has the best support for this activity. A list of headlines on the
left hand, beside the current article, allows reader to rest the pointer over the headline
of the current article, while allowing the eye and hand to move down to the next
headline and select it, if the current article fails to arouse interest. In this way it
corresponds well to the structure of the article with its short lead paragraph followed by
the article text to read if interest has been aroused. In Corren, instead the next article is
found somewhere in the list of articles for the current part, presented below the current

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article, thus corresponding better with a reader who reads the whole article, and then
would like to re-read the list of contents to find the next article. In Expressen, the part
is only represented as a menu item in the table contents. This forces a reading style of
going back and forth between either article and first page or article and main page for
the newspaper part. That main page is present in Expressen and Corren, looking much
like the first page of the paper. DN only presents the part as the mentioned left hand
column.
    Going between parts is supported well in Expressen and Corren with the menu
(figure 1 & 2, framework A 1), present on all pages. In Expressen, the current part
could have been highlighted better, as that would support selecting the current part. In
DN, a menu at the top of the page is used as a framework to reach the four main news
sections. In one of the sections, the menu isn't present. This is clearly a design mistake,
treating the menu either as a page layout element, or a hypertext associated with a
section. Furthermore DN uses different interaction elements and layouts for some parts,
which in principle only affects learning of how to interact with the structure. These are
examples of problems with the use of the digital material.

5.2 Mediating the news
The mediating and social roles of the paper forms a traditional mass communication,
with readers treated like individuals, who are only allowed to state their opinion on
selected topics. Gatekeeping, storytelling, validation and editing all belong to the media
house. The audience is assumed to consist of swedish citizens since the language is
Swedish and the mix of articles is not apparently4 aimed at any particular sub-group of
society.
   The on-line discussions and opinion polls differ from the readers' contribution
sections in printed editions. There is simply more space for people to tell their view of
the story, and it is connected to the article in question. Also, there is a shorter delay
between writing a text and having it published. However, as readers take the role of
storytellers, they are not being given a prominent position in the papers. Their
contribution is being placed at least two steps from the first page, making them
invisible in the analysis and also unseen by readers not especially asking for the views
of other people. There is usually a pre-edited selection of articles to discuss, which is a
disadvantage for free debate, while making the discussions manageable for the
gatekeepers.
   The extensive use of flows demands a constant process of storytelling, gatekeeping,
validation and editing from the media house, on the level of activity and mediating

4 The articles do not appear to be selected for any particular interest group, political or otherwise, but to
  evaluate whether that is really the case, an additional analysis must be made, an analysis outside the
  scope of this article.

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roles. From the audience, these flows demands monitoring, to stay updated with current
events. As the flows have different speeds, there is something for the audience wanting
to know the most important current events (Flow B1, figure 1 - 3), and something for
the audience wanting to know recent events, including less important news (Flow A1 -
A5, figure 3; Flow B2 Figure 1).
   The framework, represented by menus and parts, demands very little maintenance
from the media house, and for the audience it shows what topics are covered by the
paper.

5.3 Implications for design
As has already been mentioned, allowing the readers to become storytellers to a larger
extent would pose a problem for the gatekeeping of the articles. In a similar fashion,
the extensive usage of flows poses a problem for anybody copying these popular sites.
Doing so, one must also copy the speed of the flows, demanding a constant activity of
editing and gatekeeping of content, which might have to be produced as well. Failure to
do this either results in a site which appears "dead" or which changes faster than the
cycles of consumption, moving too fast for the audience to see the all the relevant
content. Furthermore, the current misrepresentation of the site, by the streams on the
first page, might not be desirable on sites with other content. For sites with more static
contents, it would be questionable to use streams to this extent.
    Clearly, many possibilities remain unused. Personalisation based on individual
preferences or reader communities is not supported. No communities or groups may
create their own papers by discussing and moderating the discussions of news items.
Creating a community paper with the newspapers as a core, is not supported either. The
lack of non-text content is most evident, but would demand that the papers acquire the
competence to produce for other modalitites, and it would demand that the audience
gets sufficient bandwith to receive multimodal content.

6 Future Research
Research introducing a different distribution of roles between audience and media
house, in particular allowing the audience to act as publishing communities rather than
individuals, is currently being planned. Furthermore, it would probably pay off to
experiment with multimodal content, and a wider variety of interaction elements, such
as direct manipulation.

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7 Acknowledgements
I wish to thank Mattias Arvola and the anonymous reviewers for their valuable feedback on
earlier drafts of this paper.

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