News site (news site)

See News article

Over time, the news changed its form, from speaking to writing, then turning into pictures and videos - they still change and take a variety of forms. The development of the Internet entailed the transition of many media outlets to a new format. There were online media , which, like print, TV media were guided by the rules of journalism. This has led to the fact that news is now distributed almost instantly around the world using specialized sites.

The following are important milestones in the development of news sites:

• 1994, November - The first website of the British newspaper The Telegraph , Electronic Telegraph , was launched. ^[6] Its first editor, Derek Beeston, wrote: “Our goal was simple: to explore this new environment; evaluate the usefulness of creating a Telegraph as an online brand; Learn about technology and business opportunities. The last point, although the most alien to journalists, was clearly dominant in the thoughts of the owner at that time. ” ^[7]
• December 1997 - BBC Online begins offering a full range of services. In less than a year, more than 140,000 pages of content and 61,000 pages of news. ^[eight]
• January 1999 - The Guardian Unlimited launches its network of websites. By 2001, The Guardian has 2.4 million unique users, making it the most popular news site in the UK. It is worth noting that the newspaper did not come to this immediately. The development of an online publication began in 1994-95. Towards the end of 1995, the so-called technical section of the newspaper, called OnLine , was launched, and in 1996-1998 websites appeared that focused on job search, some sports, and general news. The Guardian Unlimited website network was launched as a unit in January 1999 (according to the plan, the network was to change the domain name twice - in 2008 and 2013). ^[9]
• 1999, March - The first version of RSS headline syndication was developed by Netscape . This meant that when news is published on websites, the RSS file is updated and other sites can now use the material headers from this file with a link to the original. RSS , left by Netscape , continued to be developed by UserLand . RSS began to play an important role in the development of news aggregators and news sites. ^[ten]
• February 2000 - The Associated Press launches AP Streaming News ^[11] to provide news sites with multimedia content. “The online news market is growing rapidly to include multimedia presentations that include audio and video, driven by the growing momentum of broadband technology and greater competition for the audience,” said Jim Kennedy, AP Director of Multimedia Services. ^[12] “The AP developed AP Streaming News to help its member newspapers and broadcasters get into the first wave of this audio-video era.”
• February 2000 - Audible.com launched. This website is dedicated to selling various digital recordings of speech. In 2004, the site recruited 100,000 new members in just nine months and was listed on the NASDAQ list. The site also sells sound versions of daily newspapers that can be automatically downloaded overnight to MP3 players. ^[13]
• 2000, August - Usability guru Jacob Nielsen says email newsletters are often too long and take too long to read. “Users experience incredible stress when processing their incoming messages: they have to receive urgent news from their boss, customers, spouse, etc., so they usually do not have time to read a lot,” says Nielsen. ^[14]
• 2000, September - The first gloomy forecasts for the future of online content appear. The question was first raised about how long online publications, especially news sites, will live. One of the first companies to claim the viability of online media was the consulting firm Digital Deliverance ^[15] , which works in the field of interactive publishing. In March 2002, a company representative also made a presentation, “ The News Business is a Web Failure!” At the annual meeting of the New England Newspaper Association in Boston . ^[sixteen]
• 2000, November - The International Herald Tribune launches a radically redesigned site. The site allows users to scroll through page spreads and save headings for later viewing. Many changes have come to taste. ^[17]
• 2001, January - By circulation, you can understand that large-format newspaper sites are much more popular than tabloid ones. This month, The Guardian Unlimited received 25.9 million views, while The Sun reached only one third. ^[18]
• April 2001 - The new Scottish daily Business AM announces a massive investment in its online version. A new searchable archive and other interactive features will be available free of charge for registered users. Business AM ceased publication in 2004. ^[nineteen]
• September 2001 - The demolition of the World Trade Center in New York stuns the world and news sites are bursting at the seams from the abundance of visitors. Some sites had to use additional capacity after a surge in demand, reaching 600 service requests per second. One of the editors of telegraph.co.uk said that online journalism entered a new era when the twin towers were attacked. ^[20]
• September 2001 - One of the largest publishers in the Netherlands shut down most of its online publications, accusing them of destroying print revenue. This is not the only case of radical decisions - in 2015, the Dutch soccer magazine Voetbal International reduced 35% of its web impressions in order to improve the quality of advertising. ^[21]
• September 2001 - Contrary to all forecasts, Salon.com ^[22] starts making money thanks to 12,000 subscriptions to its website. Patrick Hurley, Senior Vice President of Business Operations, spoke about hopes for an additional $ 2 million annually by subscribing to his premium service, which offers daily news and additional features without any advertising. ^[23]
• 2001, October - After the September 11 attacks in the United States, online editors are advised to pre-create action plans for such cases in order to cope with the surge in demand. ^[24]
• November 2001 - Irelandclick.com switches to a full-fledged subscription model, when materials can only be obtained by paying. The editor of this media claimed that their articles “occupy an important niche”. “Why not pay us if we have excellent columnists and we provide materials in Irish? And if someone in Belfast has to pay, why can't it be someone from Belarus or Boston? When you pay for something, it is perceived as of great value, ”said Máirtín Ó Muilleoir , who was not only the editor of this resource, but also the Lord Mayor of Belfast in 2013-2014 ^[25] and an adviser to the managing editor of Daily Ireland , Irish Republican newspaper, which ceased to exist in 2006 ^[26] .
• February 2002 - A French study shows that local newspapers that have their own websites have healthier print runs than those without them. A report prepared by Pressflex, an editorial consultancy , said: “While there is a general consensus that newspaper news websites gobble up print runs, this analysis suggests the opposite is true. These figures are confirmed by previous polls in the US readership, which found that news sites are beneficial. Weak newspapers may cross off the Internet from the list of suspected criminals. ” ^[27]
• July 2002 - The New York Times was the first newspaper to digitize its entire archive. Now the entire archive, starting in 1851, should be included in the search database. ^[28]
• October 2002 - The search giant Google launches Google News , an automated service that uses sophisticated computer algorithms to collect headlines from over 4,000 news sites. Publishers later begin to worry that Google is building a business around its own content without paying for it, but Google is defending the tool as mutually beneficial because it drives traffic to news sites. ^[29]
• 2002, November - Spain's largest daily newspaper, El Pais , becomes the first European national daily newspaper to charge for access to all of its web content. It is worth remembering that the other Spanish newspapers were the first to go online - the government Boletín Oficial del Estrado ^[30] , which was first published on the Internet in 1994, then the two Barcelona newspapers El Periódico and La Vanguardia , ABC and El Diario Vasco in 1995 year. El Pais and El Mundo only hit the net in 1996. ^[31]
• February 2003 - Journalists and experts in the US predict that news feeds will change the way they publish online news. JD Lasica, a senior editor of online journalism surveys ^[32], says: “News feeds provide the media that mainly work on news, another way to get that same elusive creature: a tech-savvy professional. I bet that for a year or so, students will be tied to RSS subscriptions to a greater extent. ” ^[33]
• February 2003 - The space shuttle Columbia crashed . Most British Saturday newspapers are already in print when news of the event reaches the media. Scotsman.com's deputy head of online content said: “We missed the opportunity to tell the story of the shuttle on Saturday because the newspaper was going to print early in the day. This event was covered on our website, even though it appeared in our Sunday newspaper (in print) only the next day. ”In connection with the incident, Stacy D. Kramer, editor-in-chief of Cable World , criticized automated systems news sorters used by Google News , CNN and others. ^[34]
• July 2003 - The European Internet Journalism community gathered in Barcelona for a one-day Net Media conference . The theme of the conference is “How to make online media pay its own way.” ^[35]
• December 2003 - The Daily Mail is finally announcing its plans to launch a new site. “We had the courage to wait,” says Avril Williams, editorial director of Associated New Media.co.uk ^[36] “- The Daily Mail is our most expensive brand, and we wanted to be sure that our audience is ready, as are our advertisers ready, and that it will be profitable. ” ^[37]
• December 2003 - UK regional newspapers call for tighter controls on the BBC online service. The Newspaper Society ^[38] claims that the corporation has become a powerful competitor to the regional press. Disputes about how the BBC act in existing realities still exist. ^[39]
• 2004, April - 20six ^[40] , a platform for blogging on the Internet, appears that claims that users are satisfied with the availability of independent, reliable news on the Internet. With 20six, they host over 15,000 weblogs, which attract about 250,000 unique users each month. ^[41]
• 2004 May - The Daily Mail finally launches its website, becoming the last major UK national newspaper to do so. Publishers decided to develop a strategy for the news site, despite a statement by executive director Charles Sinclair ^[42] in April 2001, in which he said that the company "does not believe that newspapers will transfer themselves to the Internet."
• July 2004 - Microsoft launches a trial news aggregator service called Newsbot, using a database of about 4,800 news sources. ^[43]
• 2004, October - Independent organizations and advocates of freedom of speech are outraged when the UK Home Office responds to an FBI request and intercepts the servers of the British Indymedia website. This leads to a reduction in the number of Indymedia sites - only 21 out of 140 remained. As a result, everything returned to normal after six days. The ministry did not disclose the reason for such actions. In November of the same year, when the question reappears, the Home Office refuses to give any explanations to the British deputies. “I can only confirm that no UK law enforcement agencies were involved in this issue,” said Caroline Flint , Under Secretary of State for the Department of Home Affairs, “I have no right to discuss a particular case in more detail.” ^[44]
• 2005, July - Witnesses sending photos and reports made on mobile phones provide material before professional journalists. Professional photographers fear that their work is threatened by the rise of “citizen journalism,” but many publishers believe that content is a valuable addition to the “body” of their core material. The problem of increasing the number of such “citizen journalists” became only more relevant in subsequent years. ^[45]
• April 2005 - Few speeches have had the same impact on the industry as Rupert Murdoch's revelations to the American newspaper editorial community. He announces that the newspapers are “surprisingly, inexplicably complacent” in the face of a decline in readership, and describes the Internet as “a monumental, unique opportunity to rebuild and become healthier than ever before.” ^[46]
• February 2006 - The World Newspaper Association (WAN) creates a task force consisting of members of the publishing industry to challenge what it calls “content exploitation” by search engines. The business model of search engines relies on aggregating the content of news publishers, while doing without a fee. Despite the fact that such an initiative has received a response, most of the industry does not agree with this step, recognizing that search engines play a vital role in attracting traffic to news sites. ^[47]
• 2006, March - The Guardian launches an extensive new online commentary project, creating a pool of several hundred commentators and experts. ^[48] Editor-in-chief Emily Bell predicts that the future of debate and discussion will be online. ^[49]
• 2010 - The citizen journalism site iReport is used to track the location of victims of the earthquake in Haiti. ^[50]
• 2010 - Wikileaks works with newsreaders on a series of important stories. War diaries from Iraq and Afghanistan, and the diversion of US diplomatic telegrams called Cablegate ^[51] in English sources dominate this year and foster greater interest in data journalism. ^[52]
• 2010 - For the first time in the US, the consumption of online news and advertising has surpassed print. ^[53]
• 2011 - The New York Times introduces “leaky” or “dosed” paid access. Unlike the model of “hard” paid access, the idea of ​​“dosed" assumes that readers have the opportunity to access some articles for free, or to access them when shared on social networks. Although this is not the first case, the noted effectiveness of this measure has prompted others to try a similar approach. ^[54]
• 2011 - Amazon launches the Kindle Singles format ^[55] , which stimulates interest in electronic forms of “long forms” of journalism stronger than traditional feature articles. ^[56]
• 2012 - The New York Times publishes a story titled “ Snow Fall” ^[57] , taking a new step toward longreads for tablet users. ^[58]
• 2013 - Google Glass project launched. This led to an increase in the number of experiments related to the collection of news and news applications based on “wearable” (on the body) technologies. ^[59]
• 2015 - The Meerkat video application is released, followed by Periscope and Facebook Live ^[60] . Live video is becoming an important element of publishing strategy. ^[61]
• 2015 - Apple Watch provokes a new wave of interest in “journalism of the look”, when people are more motivated to take only one look at the news and understand its essence, instead of reading it in its entirety. ^[62]
• 2016 - The Independent is now released online only. ^[63]

Already at the beginning of the journey, when news sites just went online, many wondered how journalism will change, what are the pros and cons of online news publications, and whether they will survive as a format. The year 2000 was significant, when the first calls appeared that news sites were in crisis.

In May 2000, Dean of the University of Maryland College of Journalism , Tom Kankel, said that the biggest ethical issue facing journalism today is the influence of advertisers on online news publications. “In the Internet environment, the only way to make money at this time is through advertising ,” he said in an article on the Pointer Institute’s website, “There is already pressure that motivates the use of materials that attract advertisers. This is a huge problem that is already beginning to manifest itself, and it will threaten the entire industry as a whole. ” ^[64]

In August 2000, a survey was conducted that showed that the British public does not believe that sites on the Internet publish reliable news. Only 1% of respondents (1000 people were interviewed) said that the Internet is their most important source of news. The survey was commissioned by the Just sites business news provider. ^[65] Later Just sites evolved into Aroq Ltd , an online publisher providing business information to four specialized industry sites, Just auto , Just drinks , Just food and Just style . ^[66]

A month later, in September 2000, the consulting company Digital Deliverance ^[15] , which works in the field of interactive publishing, came to the conclusion that the news site was an unsuccessful business model. “It is not too early to judge this. Neither web server updates, nor new middleware improvements, nor website redesign in the foreseeable future will be able to radically improve the time spent reading materials, the frequency of views and the number of pages of web newspapers already read, ”the company said. ^[67]

In April 2001, Charles Sinclair, executive director of The Daily Mail , ^[42] stated in his speech that his company “does not believe that newspapers will carry itself onto the Internet,” and added that “it (the Internet) will not be the place for the latest news. "

In February 2003, in connection with the crash of the Columbia shuttle, Stacy D. Kramer, editor-in-chief of Cable World , expressed his opinion on automated news sorting systems that led to the inefficiency of news sites, alluding to the instability of the latter: “ Google News didn’t sensible show on Saturday. Algorithms just missed this event. So we couldn’t even see anything about what was going on with the shuttle Columbia until Sunday. ” ^[34]

Despite the fact that many give (and gave) news sites a negative assessment, believing that they provoke a number of problems (or they themselves represent a problem), there are many documented cases where there was a positive impression of news sites.

In 2002, France’s editorial consulting company Pressflex conducted a study in France, which revealed that print media news sites only increase their circulation and not lower it, as previously thought. ^[27]

Three years later, the question arises of how “citizen journalism” will affect news sites. Some publishers have expressed the view that eyewitness content is a valuable addition to their published material. ^[45] In the same year, Rupert Murdoch expressed his opinion on how the Internet will affect the media, describing the network as “a monumental, unique opportunity to rebuild and become healthier than ever before.” ^[46]

News sites can be classified according to a number of signs - one of them is geographical:

1. Regional They cover the news of a particular region, for example, “ Mine! Online ” ^[68] ,“ Orenburg News ” ^[69] and others.
2. Nationwide. They broadcast throughout the country, for example, Gazeta.ru ^[70] , RIA Novosti ^[71] , Lenta.ru ^[72] and several others.

News sites may also vary depending on the topics they specialize in:

1. With a narrow theme. A web project is dedicated to a particular topic. Examples in this category are PopCornNews ^[73] and AstroNews ^[74] . It is worthwhile to understand that a news website with a narrow theme and an information portal are not the same thing. The information portal is a large, multi-level website that combines various resources and interactive services (a channel with video, an archive, the ability to communicate with users, a personal account, etc.), which are updated in real time, containing a huge amount of diverse unique content on a specific topic (while the topic itself can be quite wide, for example, events in the world, like Life ) ^[75] . So the portal becomes a repository of this or that information that is constantly updated. Despite the fact that there are media outlets that post texts with pictures and videos on their sites, for example, RT ^[76] , the news site still provides a limited number of available functions for users, focus on timely delivery of information to the audience and focus on your own resources, not on the use of third-party. Moreover, often information portals are created under the auspices of an organization that has a lot of information on a particular topic, which is the main difference from a news site, whose employees initially form an independent structure. ^[77]
2. With a wide theme. The materials can be devoted to various topics and are provided for a wide range of readers (these include all of the indicated wide-regional news sites, in addition to AiF ^[78] , Vesti.ru ^[79] and several others).

Another way to classify news sites is to divide them into content models:

1. Parsing or auto-complete sites . The latter are automatically filled due to the collection of information from various donor sites, which may include both social networks ^[80] and RSS feeds . In this case, a special program or script is used that selects materials according to certain criteria, for example, the number of views. Top 5 Yandex. News is an example of a service that selects the most popular articles ^[81] from all submitted in Yandex.News . With such a system, it is initially assumed that the materials are selected mechanically, almost without the participation of people, according to clear criteria, regardless of where they were published, but in practice it also happens that news website managers manipulate the system to create better conditions for one or another media, thereby combining the model of parsing and moderation, as happened with Yandex.News ^[82] . At the same time, you should not confuse the concepts of news aggregator and autofill sites, because, despite their similarities, news sites, unlike aggregators , do not collect all the abundance of available information, but only a part of it, for example, on a specific topic or from some specific source. Moreover, autocomplete news sites usually do not quote any media , unlike aggregators (for example, the same Media2 , which displays the lead news and the media icon from where it was taken), ^[83] but only retype the text of the news, slightly modifying , and put on automatic publication. The aggregator assumes that the news is only collected without any changes and checked for the accuracy of the information provided before it is quoted in accordance with the Federal Law “On Information, Information Technologies and the Protection of Information” . ^[84]
2. Filled with moderators and users - a collaborative model . These news sites include News2 and a number of others based on Web 2.0 technology . The interaction model within such sites can be different, for example, the user can only add an article, but the moderator approves it ( Newsland.ru and the like), or users vote on what material will be published, and moderators speak only as observers, etc.
3. News site with user content . As the name implies, with this model a web project is filled with materials by visitors. As an example, MGIMO 360 is a news item created on the basis of Vkontakte by MGIMO students. The latter are both the creators of the content and its consumers.
4. Moderation Model. In this case, news material is posted by editors. Moreover, they can both rewrite them from other sources, write on their own or receive from accredited media . A number of autofill news sites have a range of moderation tools, so they fall into the related category.
5. A mixed model , for example, a combination of autocomplete with moderation.

From the point of view of value for users and success of promotion, moderated websites or a joint model, where there are both moderation tools and the ability to leave user comments, are considered the most useful. ^[85]