Online journalism is increasing every day. There are many news agencies, newspapers, and magazines using digital publication in the global network. Documents published online are available to users, who use search engines to find them. In order to deliver documents that are relevant to the search, they must be indexed and classified. Due to the vast number of documents published online every day, a lot of research has been carried out to find ways to facilitate automatic document classification. The objective of the present study is to describe an experimental approach for the automatic classification of journalistic documents published on the Internet using the Vector Space Model for document representation. The model was tested based on a real journalism database, using algorithms that have been widely reported in the literature. This article also describes the metrics used to assess the performance of these algorithms and their required configurations. The results obtained show the efficiency of the method used and justify further research to find ways to facilitate the automatic classification of documents.Keywords: Automatic classification. Internet. Vector model. Resumo As publicações de textos jornalísticos na Internet aumentam a cada dia. São muitas as agências de notícias, jornais e revistas com publicações digitais na grande rede. Os documentos publicados ficam disponíveis aos usuários, que, por sua vez, usam buscadores para encontrá-los. Para se encontrarem os documentos mais próximos da busca realizada, estes devem estar previamente indexados e classificados. Com o volume gigantesco de materiais publicados a cada dia, muitas pesquisas estão sendo realizadas para encontrar facilitadores para a classificação automática de documentos. Este artigo objetiva demonstrar uma experiência de classificação automática de documentos jornalísticos publicados na