| Traditional media, print newspapers and television news, now face a relatively new competitor gaining popularity at astonishing speed. The Internet is proving to be major player with respect to the dissemination of news. Even though some online versions of newspapers still shovel their print editions, there are profound and important differences emerging with respect to content between online and print versions. Now, many newspaper Web sites add more and more news items provided from wire services. Some newspapers even create special news stories to be run only by their online versions.;This study examines how Internet news content differs from that of printed news by comparing the news content of online and print versions of the same newspaper. A content analysis was conducted of both versions of the Detroit Free Press, which included all news items throughout a period of five weekdays. An interview with the online editor of the paper was also conducted in order to obtain additional information. This study shows that the online version had more news content, more related articles and longer headlines than its print counterpart. There were also significant differences in the distribution of news sources as well as articles by topic and geographical coverage. The online version had less photos than the print version, however, and no significant difference was found in the average story length. |
