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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.

While the attention paid by the news media to European Parliamentary elections has increased, the chapter asks whether the nature of news coverage has changed. In particular, as coverage has increased (which may be viewed as a good development), have there been unintended consequences resulting in the nature of coverage. The chapter asks whether EP election coverage follows a general secular trend of increasing personalization and focus on strategy rather than policy. The chapter's analysis suggests that the political system can explain variation across time and space in election coverage. If hard‐news coverage and substantive policy coverage are beneficial for the political process, then its findings suggest that, in particular, close elections and polarized party systems may have beneficial effects. Where there are pro‐EU governments, the outlets in these systems tend to produce more hard news that is beneficial to voters but also increase horse‐race news, which may be an unintended consequence.

Chapter 4 examines the storytelling preferences of journalists and consumers. The traditional straight-news format is the leading option for both groups across the 20 sites, during periods of routine and heightened political activity. On average, across sites 72 percent of the ten most newsworthy articles and 61 percent of the ten most clicked articles are straight news; the second most popular option—feature-style narratives—amount to 15 percent and 24 percent, respectively. These differences in format are smaller than the differences in content discussed in chapter 2. Novel, born-on-the-Web options are not popular with journalists or with consumers. Across sites, blogs account for 4 percent of the journalists’ choices and 3 percent of those of consumers, and user-generated content averages 1 percent and 0.26 percent respectively. When the analysis considers combinations of content and format the gap between journalists’ and consumers’ choices is significantly smaller than the content gap alone. Moreover, storytelling preferences appear to be largely independent of variations in the sociopolitical context. These findings belie accounts that news has gone soft, at least for online news. They also question the hype about novel forms of storytelling, such as blogs and user-generated content.

This chapter focuses on breadth of news content and its relationship with audience segments. More specifically, it examines how the content of news on the Internet is tailored to specific audience characteristics and interests. After considering the history of medium specialization and how media tend to evolve, the chapter explains how online news providers make use of technological interactivity and audience selectivity. It also outlines the organizing structure of media evolution and how content and audience segmentation or specialization arise from media competition and development. In addition, it looks at some of the factors that tend to restrain the segmentation of online news content and audiences into discrete units. Finally, it discusses the structures of online news and the categorization of news through the production of hard and soft news.

This chapter discusses The Oprah Winfrey Show’s hybridization of the news and talk show conventions. Using the show’s coverage of Hurricane Katrina’s aftermath as a case study, the chapter shows how an Oprahfied brand of “soft” news characterizes the devolution of mainstream broadcast news under the guise of advocacy journalism.