Genre characteristics - a front page analysis of 85 Swedish online newspapers

Abstract

The online newspapers entered the Internet in the mid-nineties and since then it has become more and more common to read news online. There is a long tradition of designing newspapers in print but today there is a demand from both academics and practitioners for more knowledge about how to design user friendly news sites. The challenge is to design the online newspaper, in this rapidly changing media, to be the same familiar, user friendly and universally accepted product as the printed newspaper. We have designed a study in three parts to address this challenge. The overall research question is: How can design for a media in rapid development be communicated within a genre? The purpose of the first part of the study, presented in this paper, is to build a framework for identifying genre characteristics and to describe the Swedish online newspaper genre of today. We have conducted a front page analysis on the total population of 85 Swedish online newspapers. We suggest a quadruple of the genre concepts and a grid to handle positioning when building the framework. To describe the Swedish online newspaper genre we have used the taxonomy for the evolution of cybergenres together with the so called broadsheet metaphor. Aiming at a more comprehensive understanding of the online newspaper genre we modified the model by adding the leaf node 'progressed'.©2004 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. However, permission to reprint/republish this material for advertising or promotional purposes or for creating new collective works for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or to reuse any copyrighted component of this work in other works must be obtained from the IEEE

The appropriateness of Swedish municipality web site designs

“…To focus on the use situations that are designed, as the genre characteristics are intended for communicating design, mediated user role and group has been added to Ihlström and Åkesson's [9] quadruple of genre concepts (See User in Table 2). Their functionality concept, which focuses on whether a content element requires interaction, was also redefined.…”

“…For example, a Web site might be dominated by both descriptions of the offered services (filter) and at the same time have elements from the newspaper genre. Not all, but enough distinctive genre rules in a genre must be followed by a Web site to be recognizable [9]. In the classification used in this study, the most dominating genre characteristic has governed the categorization.…”

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“…To deal with this complex issue, we reviewed the available literature on on-line news reading (e.g., [1]) and devices for presenting text (including book and document readers). We also constructed scenarios to help us envision the future use of the ePaper.…”

Web Pages, Text Types, and Linguistic Features: Some Issues

“…Этого нельзя сказать о многих веб-страницах, поскольку визуальная структура страницы, включающей в свой состав новостную статью, в большинстве случаев не может быть сведена на нет или просто проигнорирована без потери важной информации (ср. [6,7]). Веб-страница -своего рода хранилище, из которого читатель выбирает нужную ему / ей информацию.…”