FREEZING THE FLOW OF ONLINE NEWS

Abstract

According to previous research, two characteristics of online news as opposed to traditional news are interactivity and immediacy. However, most research in this area has focused on the news site-level of analysis, and there are only a few studies on how interactivity and immediacy affect online news on the news story-level of analysis. The main reason for this appears to be that the very nature of online news makes observation by traditional research methods, such as quantitative content analysis, problematic. Against this background, the overall purpose of this paper is to explore methodological approaches for the study of interactivity and immediacy on the news story-level of online news. The paper develops a three-pronged strategy for freezing the flow of online news to enable systematic content analyses of interactivity and immediacy, and tests this strategy in a comparative analysis of the online news sites Guardian.co.uk in Britain and Aftonbladet.se in Sweden.