Examination of 38 Web Newspapers Shows Nonlinear Storytelling Rare

Abstract

Most journalism-skills textbooks nowadays include lessons on writing for online news media.1 Their core message is that journalists should use the Internet-powered Web for more than delivering linear old-media content to their online audiences. Instead, they should use it to deliver an interlinked, multiple media and context rich news-story format that is unique to the Web. The logic is that first, this format empowers readers by allowing them to choose how they wish to read an online news story and second, readers will become repeat users of Web newspapers that so empower them.Several studies have described the content of Web newspapers but none has looked specifically for fully defined instances of nonlinear storytelling. It is important to know if journalism textbooks are teaching nonlinear storytelling as journalists practice it. This study attempts to shed some light on that by testing textbook definition of nonlinear storytelling on the Web editions of U.S. daily newspapers.BackgroundJournalism textbooks take their notion of the ideal nonlinear story in part from Nielsen's work on Web-page design2 and Fredin's hyperstory model.3 The nonlinear story is more than a single [Web page] of text with perhaps accompanying photos or graphics.4 Instead, it is part of larger news narrative made up of layers of related text and audio-visual content that are hyperlinked together. This format sets up an interactive reading process5 in which readers actively choose their own paths through the narrative by accessing its constituent parts nonlinearly, in any order that suits them.By definition, the ideal nonlinear story begins at the newspaper's front Web as headlined abstract of current-day story that appears in full on an inside Web page. A page link connects the two. The abstract acts as roadmap. It briefs the reader on the current-day story and provides links to different layers of the narrative of which the story is part.6 The layers are the core of the format and they hold such extra content as related same-day and archived stories and audio and video reports. The inside-page story also links to these extra-content layers by definition. That way, readers can start their treks through the narrative immediately, from the abstract or later from the full-length story the abstract introduces.However, front-page headline, alone, arguably offers too little information to function as the opening layer of nonlinearly told story. A pageturning link by itself does not bring nonlinearity to story because it merely is high-tech duplicate of the physical act of turning newsprint by hand.There is anecdotal evidence that journalists do use some forms of nonlinear storytelling for special projects and high-profile breaking news.7 But the occasional or routine use of nonlinear storytelling has not been the specific focus of most scholarly studies of Web newspaper content. Instead, the trend has been to the broad swath of content and technical features at newspaper Web editions.8 A few studies have focused on how newspapers cover specific news topics9 or use visual content10 at their Web sites, or how their Web-page content compares to that on their printed pages.11 One study looked in part at Web-edition content by surveying newsworkers who help produce the online news product.12Although these works looked at some of the constituent elements of nonlinear storytelling, all but one looked at them out of context-outside of structured, guiding definition of the format. Gubman and Greer13 made nonlinear storytelling part of their catalog study of 83 U.S. newspaper Web sites. They defined it sparsely, as new story published in blocks of text of varying computer-screen lengths and found few instances of it. Tremayne made nonlinear storytelling the main focus of his study of the Web sites of 10 national news outlets, including three newspapers. …