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This chapter examines online local news within the top one hundred U.S. television markets using comScore panel data that track a quarter of a million Internet users across more than a million World Wide Web domains. It identifies and analyzes 1,074 local online news and information sources across these one hundred markets, studying their audience reach, traffic, and affiliation (or lack thereof) with traditional media. The breadth and the market-level granularity of the comScore data makes this study the most comprehensive look to date at Internet-based local news. The portrait that emerges contradicts claims that new online outlets are adding significantly to local news diversity. The chapter argues that local news on the Web is fundamentally about consuming less news from the same old-media sources. It also looks at concentration in local online news markets, and conducts a census of Internet-only local news sites that reach more than a minimum threshold of traffic.

This book explores how infrastructures and strategies for distributing online television news are developed and maintained. Focusing on MSNBC, a hybrid company built to link television and the Internet, it challenges often-simplistic assumptions about how media is produced and considers the route that online news takes to reach consumers. It discusses the notion of “conversation economy,” articulated by John Battelle in his 2005 book The Search, and the tendency of online journalists to select story topics partially on the basis of whether an article is likely to generate page views through sharing and search. Part 1 of the book considers the path taken by MSNBC television programs as they made their way to online audiences; Part 2 examines MSNBC's online distribution platforms from the vantage points of different system builders within the larger organization; and Part 3 focuses on how MSNBC's distribution channels were built to serve a broad array of online audiences.

This chapter examines media distribution within the context of sociotechnical systems. It begins with a discussion of the concept of recalcitrance and its relation to heterogeneous engineering before turning to technologies as parts of heterogeneous systems. It then considers the persistence of heterogeneous engineering in the world of online television news distribution, along with time delay as an example of how the route of online video is influenced by the various forces and architects involved in online and social television news distribution. It also describes the distribution system developed by MSNBC for online television news in the years leading up to 2010 by tracing how a typical cable news program is brought to online audiences.

This chapter explores, T-Online, an online news portal that does little of its own reporting but specializes in recrafting and recirculating news agency content. It investigates new modes of user feedback that are characteristic of online publicity and how the growing (spectral) presence of the end user in news organizations has unsettled traditional relations of journalistic expertise and authority. Using the news coverage of the crash of Air France Flight 447 (AF 447), it comments on the practices, self-understandings, temporalities, and interfaces of an online news department. The extra journalistic labor, attention, and coordination that AF 447 demanded illuminated more routine issues of sourcing, timing, feedback, competition, and audience that are vital for understanding online news journalism.

This chapter focuses on the consumption of online news at work. This consumption is a normal aspect of the daily routines of many workers. It contributes to a displacement of the news consumption habit from traditional to digital media among those who already have that habit and fosters the emergence of such a habit among those who did not have it. Furthermore, the sequence and dynamics of online news consumption at work are marked by the prevalence of the “readable Web.” People are far more focused on obtaining information from news sites than on taking advantage of the “writable Web” through participation in blogs, forums, and other commentary spaces. This depiction of online news consumption at work reveals a tension between continuity and discontinuity in its comparison with news consumption in traditional media.

This chapter examines the connection between the press and the Internet sectors. It discusses how and why the major Internet companies providing news service and social media in China became a thorn in the side of the Chinese state, despite the state's efforts to control them. Existing studies of rising public opinion in China tend to focus on how technological properties of the Internet can empower citizens to bring about social change and how the Chinese state has attempted to forestall such change. Such work tends to pay less attention to the ways in which particular contexts mediate and moderate the technological effects of the Internet. The chapter traces the restructuring of the media field in China, especially the development of the online news market, following the state's decision to connect the country to the Internet. As the chapter demonstrates, preexisting conditions in the newspaper market played a key—but often neglected—role in shaping China's online news market and discursive arena.

This chapter discusses homogenization of news products. It reveals the consequences of imitation in journalistic work for the resulting news products. All cases of content overlap in the print newspapers and nearly all in the online newspapers had to do with hard news. This is a clear expression of the divergent logics of hard- and soft-news production and, especially, the much higher prevalence of monitoring and imitation in the former than in the latter. A glance at the main findings regarding content overlap in hard news across the three levels of analysis reveals a homogenization of print products over time and strong evidence for homogeneity of both print and online news in the contemporary context. Further analysis shows the power of the production dynamics to generate substantive field-level effects for the resulting news product outcomes.

This chapter offers both a more detailed examination of the principles behind the recommendation systems and examines the comparative impact of these technologies across media organizations. Recommender systems research has changed dramatically over the past decade, but little of this new knowledge has filtered into research on web traffic, online news, or the future of journalism. Scholarship to date has focused on the impact of these technologies for an individual web user or an adopting media firm. But there has been little exploration of the wholesale effects of these changes not only within news and media organizations, but also with regard to competition between them. In addition, this chapter takes a detailed look at the Netflix Prize—a contest with surprising lessons even for those who do not care about movies. As it turns out, the task of recommending the right movie is similar to recommending almost anything—predicting which songs users like, which ads they prefer, which news stories they engage with.

This chapter examines issues of monitoring and imitation in the online and print newsrooms of Clarín and La Nacion. The analysis reveals a greater intensity and pervasiveness in the monitoring practices and a larger reliance on technology in these practices among journalists who produce hard news than among their soft-news counterparts. It also reveals that journalists who make hard news utilize the information learned through monitoring to imitate other players in the organizational field significantly more than do their colleagues who make soft news. In addition, the account demonstrates that the monitoring and imitation actions of hard-news journalists sometimes acquire different manifestations depending on whether they work in an online or print newsroom. The changing patterns of technological infrastructures and practices also help to illuminate how monitoring and imitation emerge at the intersection of situated practices and contextual structures.

This chapter examines attempts to popularize and democratize news online through collaborative filtering. Collaborative filtering offers a means to replace the role of professional editors in setting the news agenda and deciding which stories deserve the most prominence. Instead of professional editors, collaborative filtering relies on algorithms to sort, rank, and prioritize the news based on the activity of large groups of web users. Various news sites have added some aspect of collaborative filtering, but the chapter focuses on social news sites (Reddit, Newsvine, and Slashdot) because they allow their users to make conscious voting choices about which stories should be most prominent. These sites epitomize the defining characteristics of the social Web and apply them to news.

This book has explored trends in the distribution of online television news and the underlying sociotechnical systems by looking at the case of MSNBC. It has described concepts and offered insights regarding new and emerging organizational forms and distribution networks that are often said to be hallmarks of the Internet. It has suggested that many significant relationships shaping both access to content and the nature of the systems delivering it can be discovered by tracing the path of media as it reaches its intended audience. This concluding chapter discusses contemporary, multifaceted media organizations and their efforts at online distribution. It also considers the notions of epistemic cultures and heterogeneous engineering and how tracing out the “voltas” of media distribution allows us to reevaluate the so-called “moments of tracing.” Finally, it assesses the role of transparent intermediaries, or “business-to-business” distribution firms, in the distribution of a provider's content while remaining invisible to end users.

This chapter focuses on how online news is generated and presented. It compares the content of online news with that created for the offline media (for example, newspapers, radio and television), and whether the distinction between offline and online news remains a meaningful one. It also examines the extent with which news appearing on the Internet reflects traditional notions of the importance of issues and events, along with the novel ways that online news content can be disseminated to the audience. The role of citizen journalism such as blogs and news feeds in the news environment is considered. The chapter concludes by discussing how the creation and presentation of news online can affect the way citizens understand events, issues, and public policy.

This chapter examines the seeming contradictions of online news and how the online news environment will evolve. It first considers how the news business operates online and how the news is influenced, created, and consumed by Internet audiences. It then looks at audience selectivity and news specialization, the fragmentation of knowledge in the online environment, the concept of information democratization, and how attending to the news affects what people know about public affairs. It also analyzes how the apparent contradictions and conflicts regarding online news relate to some of the most important potential consequences of the evolution of news on the Internet. In particular, it discusses how online news will interact with other social institutions and phenomena. The chapter concludes by assessing the future of online news and the ways in which news may develop online and offline.

This chapter discusses the production of hard and soft news with focus on Clarín.com, an online news portal. The account of Clarín.com shows that there are major differences between the two units devoted to the production of hard and soft news. These differences stand in contrast to a dominant strain in the literature that highlights the existence of shared practices and principles that cut across hard and soft news. This theme emerges in several ways in which scholars blur the boundaries that separate hard and soft news. First, some sociological analyses underscore the political and cultural significance of soft news. Second, political communication scholars address a turn away from hard news and a trend toward a softening in the reporting of hard news. Triggered by such findings, studies have examined the circumstances in which soft-news outlets convey public affairs content.

This epilogue provides an update on MSNBC and NBC News's footprint in the distribution of online television news since their acquisition by Comcast, with particular emphasis on the restructuring of MSNBC.com into an expanded NBC News Digital and the creation of an entirely new website for the MSNBC cable news channel. It discusses other changes at MSNBC, including the rebranding of the Blue Site as NBCNews.com, the creation of a new MSNBC.com based on the open source content management system Drupal, and the use of the “Newsvine 3.0” commenting system as the basis for all the community features on the new site. Despite some changes that seem to show the influence of a centralized management and hierarchy, complex assemblages of system builders remain both inside and outside the MSNBC organization. Heterarchy is alive and well within MSNBC's constellation of companies and teams.

This chapter elaborates on the theoretical, methodological, and contextual issues of imitation in social life. It discusses imitation in work, organizational, and economic activities, with a focus on the media industry and mindful of the potential role of technology. An interdisciplinary framework is developed on imitation that builds on communication studies of pack journalism and the homogenization of news, sociological accounts of inter-organizational mimicry, and economic analyses of herd behavior. Despite the divergent intellectual character of scholarship about these fields, or perhaps precisely because of this divergence, their respective analyses of imitation have complementary strengths and shared limitations. It describes the two top online newspapers of Argentina, Clarín.com and Lanacion.com, their performance during the financial crises and their divergent cultural profiles. In addition, the consumption of homogenized news is discussed.

This chapter discusses the concept of audience selectivity, with particular reference to the extent with which news audiences focus their Internet time on the news. It first explains selectivity as a general concept and how people choose media and messages. It then turns to a discussion of how people select online news sites and stories. It also examines the effect of specific topics on news outlets and the content they provide, and how online news informs people about political affairs. Finally, the chapter describes how audience selectivity results in audience specialization as well as news browsing.

This chapter looks at how consumption of news online gives rise to audience fragmentation and polarization. It considers the conditions under which audience fragmentation and polarization may occur or operate. It also reviews the research literature to find evidence for the fragmentation and polarization of online news audiences in contemporary democracies. More specifically, it examines whether people base their news exposure—and thus their knowledge and opinion—on factors such as political beliefs. The chapter also discusses types of audience fragmentation and polarization, the causes of fragmentation and polarization, and exposure fragmentation and polarization on the Internet and compares those with those in the traditional or offline media. Finally, it analyzes fragmentation of public affairs knowledge and of the public agenda.