Of the 38 websites examined by the study, more than 25% had been redesigned in the last six months, usually to make them more user-centric. Though websites may be struggling to define themselves, they know where they’re going and for whom – their readers.

“A few sites even now are still largely “shovel ware,” an online morgue for the content their owners produced in another medium,” says the report.

The report considers some key potential qualities of the Internet that newspapers should exploit:

1. User Customization

User customization can generally be divided between ‘website customization’ – when users can tailor the design itself – and ‘delivery customization’ – when users tailor the nature of the content or the way it is delivered to them (such as mobile, podcasts or RSS feeds).

12 of the 38 studied websites were deemed highly customizable. Among the most popular customization features were RSS feeds, podcast options and mobile services.

Most websites have yet to delve into design and layout customizability.

“Apparently, for now, the ability to have content sent to you, or to find what you want, is taking precedence over letting people make a page theirs.”

2. User Participation

This is another popular trend for news websites this year, based on the notion that “online media would become a dialogue, not a lecture,” says the report. But although many websites implement some interactive features, “the participatory nature of the Web is more theoretical than a virtue in full bloom.”

Easy features for user participation include email to an author, comments, but the most-implemented tools related to ‘Group Voice,’ tracking most viewed, most emailed and most linked stories. Unfortunately, while these tools are useful for newspapers and readers, they are a passive form of user participation (as opposed to user content).

3. Use of Multimedia

Nearly half the sites (17) earned the lowest marks. Of those, 75% were strictly text-based websites. Granted, many of these weren’t linked to traditional print outlets, but news websites are still making poor use of their multimedia potential. The next most common form of media on websites is still pictures.

“The Web, for now, is still largely dominated by the content that fills newspapers — text and still images.” Here's how to build a full-fledged multimedia edition.

4. Site Depth

Well, suffice to say that “no other (news website) even came near Google’s average of 900+ related links attached to the lead news story,” says the report. The Web has infinite in-depth potential, but content providers and newspaper websites haven’t put nearly as much importance on this aspect as specialized outlets, such as search engines and news aggregators.

5. Editorial Branding

To an extent, editorial branding was what editors placed the most importance on: “More than any other quality, sites built themselves around the idea that their organization’s standards, judgment, and professionalism are the core of the site’s brand,” says the report.

The report identifies three key elements essential to traditional journalistic quality:

- The range of sources and originality of the content
- The level of staff control over the editorial process
- The use of bylines in top stories

According to the report, digital journalism still thinks very highly – and proceeds accordingly – of these three quality gauges. Interestingly, the content area that websites performed the best in related to branding and emphasizing one’s own standards.

To the extent that websites’ quality branding matches their actual quality, the Internet is not the Wild West it is reputed to be.

6. Revenue Streams

Last, but perhaps one of the most fundamental questions for digital journalism, how can a news website make money? Let’s leave no suspense: the report provides no clear answer and merely assesses existing revenue streams. (Online video ad revenue could be a solution though.)

Most websites’ revenues are still limited to either ads or registration fees, or some combination of both. Both components were usually reversely correlated (a website with many homepage ads might not require user registration, and vice versa). Half of the studied websites had no registration form whatsoever though and relied on advertising only.

The only website studied to have no ads on its news page was, again, Google.

The report also finds it surprising that very few websites charge for their premium content, and even more surprising that fewer websites have a pay service for week-old and archived articles (in all fairness, archive paywalls must be carefully priced, as showed the controversial New York Times’ archives prices).

News Web Site Groupings

The findings on digital journalism go one to define five broad groups of digital journalism, although the report admits that “our study led us to conclude that it is probably too early in the history of news Web sites to develop a firm typology.”

The report’s authors seem to have had fun finding the names for this somewhat arbitrary categorization: High Achievers, The Original Brand Crowd, Us and You, Jacks Of All Trades, User-Centric.

For the full report’s findings on Digital Journalism, click below. For prior postings on the report’s findings, click here and here or here for the report’s findings on newspapers.

Source: State of the News Media