From tradition to change: a study of journalistic trends in digital news reporting

The birth of the World Wide Web has made it convenient and cheaper to produce and transfer information to the receiver. Many online news sites provide information for free and the Internet and social media have brought on the affordance to self-publish and engage with the media. New media tools have made it easier to produce a variety of online blogs, magazines, digital papers and content aggregators. In the wake of the information era, journalism has developed into niche news sites, producing different types of news writing. By analyzing news accounts from the same event, this Major Research Paper compares how news language, content and structure deviate between traditional and alternative online news sites. The study reveals that alternative news sources tend to report their news in a more subjective manner, deviating from the goal of being objective, a fundamental element in traditional journalism. Analysis of how information is structured in the news articles also reveals that alternative news sites deviate from traditional forms of the inverted pyramid style (Kovach and Rosenstiel, 2007, p. 82), reporting in a narrative, chronological fashion.