Abstract
ABSTRACT Online news has rapidly claimed its place in the media landscape, and with it came the practice of incremental news updates being integrated in existing content. Yet, considering this fluid news production, researchers have been struggling with freezing the news flow and capturing the different article versions, implying that incremental news updates form an understudied phenomenon. Therefore, we conduct a large-scale study on the usage of online news updates by applying regular interval content capturing. Using in-house developed software, all 291,666 articles and 197,979 associated updates written by six leading Flemish news outlets in a period of two years (2019–2021) are collected. It is examined how commonly and in what ways updates are applied. Furthermore, a subset of 11,293 articles is manually analyzed to examine the reason(s) for applying updates. Results indicate that updates are commonly applied across all news outlets and topics. 35% of the articles are updated at least once and an updated article is updated 1.94 times on average. Approximately 4.2% of textual changes are made to correct objective or subjective errors, typically without any communication towards the reader. Therefore, we argue that transparency regarding news updates should be enhanced.
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