Author:

Keywords:

Global internet, Online news, News flow, Online news consumption

Abstract:

In 1996, Morris and Ogan wrote ‘the Internet as mass medium’, on of the most important articles in the early stages of the Internet. This paper proposed a conceptualisation of the internet as a mass medium that is comprised of multiple sites and services which are the components of the medium. This way of viewing the internet as a multifaceted mass medium helps us to study the consumption and effects of the online media. Especially with regard to online news, this meta-approach is important. In modern journalism, different types of online news media and applications cover current events. General news sites, news blogs, news feeds, news alerts, news forums, listservs, newsgroups, newsletters, wikinews sites, … all these professional and citizen news media enable us to stay informed about today’s news. However, the focus of computer-mediated communication research has been lying on the internet as general and global news medium. The internet is seen as one, homogeneous medium without acknowledging the characterizing features of the different online media and applications. In general, the internet is considered to be highly interactive and hypertextual and easy accessible for anyone, so that students are expected to consume both national and international online news papers. In this paper, we question this ‘globalness’ of the internet and propose treating the internet as a meta-medium that carries various divergent media with specific formal and structural features. More specifically, the level of multimedia, interactivity and hypertextuality (the three main features of the internet and online journalism) differs between the different news media and influences both the consumption and the learning outcome. Based on a content analysis of the municipal and federal elections in Belgium during 2006 and 2007 and an online survey with 798 students between 18 en 23 years, we propose a typology of online news media and discuss the digital divide in use of these media by students. The content analysis shows us that the news is indeed presented in multiple sub-media with specific features. The online survey reveals that the students highly differ in their consumption of online news, and that for example international news sites are consumed by only a little minority of the online news consumers.