An Analysis of “More Control, But Not Clarity In Non-linear Web Stories,”

Note: This post was written for VICO 615: Seminar in Visual Communication – VisCom Studies at Ohio University as part of the Weekly Reading Notes assignments. This was posted in my original cyberstudies.blog.com site. I am keeping it here as part of the archive of my work as described in my “Ephemeral/Restart” post.

In Wilson Lowrey’s article “More Control, But Not Clarity In Non-linear Web Stories,” he looked at the design functions of an online newspaper. The interactivity of the Internet should allow the audience to have easier access to the material. The audience is active in the process of gathering information, with the journalistic network acting as a gatekeeper filtering out the story that does not mean editorial criteria. However, online journalism sites suffer from an inferior interface that prevents the audience from accessing key stories. The audience member can feel overwhelmed and lost on a website the fails to account for the audience needs or understanding the level of cyber-literacy of their core audience (how well the audience member navigates through the Internet).
Many of the online sites, according to Lowery, are influencing traditional newspaper with the online’s use of color pictures in their coverage of events. Technological advance in software and hardware allow online publication the ability to quickly post a picture and quickly sort them for future reference. While pictures do add information vital for the proper analysis of the story, those pictures should not overwhelm the story or the audience. For an online publication to create a report with their audience, the must allow the audience a chance to understand and filter the information for themselves.

Lowery poses four hypotheses with regards to the relationship between online and newspaper publications. They are:

HI: Although the computer screen provides an good platform for displaying graphics, Internet newspapers will tend to give more priority to providing textual information than graphic information.

H2: Eye-catching graphics are more likely to appear on the home pages and the front pages than on the news article pages. 

H3: Internet newspapers are less likely to use large pictures and graphs to illustrate news articles.

H4: With the interconnected newslinks, detailed news and related information are more likely to be retrieved with few steps (clicks), and the information retrieved can go beyond the original news content. 

While he does not specifically reference, his hypotheses seem to use Everett Rogers’ (1986) Interactivity Model, George Gilder’s  (1994) New Hybrid Model, and Bordewijk and Kaam’s (1986) Media Transition Model as a means to explain the use of pictures as a means of audience interaction. Interactivity Model would state that the use of an image is merely an extension of the natural attributes of interpersonal communication. New Hybrid Model would indicate that adding a picture to an article is part of the production and distribution of the new media. Media Transition Model would show how online media has evolved from traditional newspapers.

The method that was selected for the research was a contextual analysis of stories from online and print newspapers. During a ten-day period, the researcher observed what content was placed on the stories, how the content was placed, what form the information took (pictures, graphs, news items) and overall structure of the publication. For online publications, the researchers recorded the linking patterns and structure to observe the interconnectivity of the website.

The researcher observed that the traditional print newspapers maintained the structure and design throughout the course of the research. The papers observed were the New York Times, Washington Post, and the USA Today, with their corresponding online newspapers. There were 3.4 more news items present online as opposed to the print newspaper. The research was able to support the hypotheses present through their calculation of material and analysis of the design. Lowery used the hypotheses to explain the typical information flow of Internet Newspapers. The audience can use Internet newspapers as a gatekeeper to control the flow of information, but there are other sources that the audience can use. It is up to the online publication to design interfaces that allow the audience to take advantage of the interconnectivity of the Internet.