With a worldwide growing interest in journalism and journalists came an upswing in cross-national survey research among journalists from the print and broadcast media in the last five years. Since 1994 a new type of communicator is on the World Wide Web: the online journalist. Research into online journalism and journalists has been understandably scarce - the medium is young. Those studies that do exist suffer from a kind of anachronistic approach: explaining the new by using the old. This paper offers a brief overview of the existing literature and makes some suggestions to develop a comprehensive research instrument for the online news environment that can both stand the test of time as well as offer researchers anywhere a model for cross-national research.