Business news web sites differ from newspapers in business content

Newspaper Research Journal, Spring 2003 by Jung, Jaemin

Grade Level

The grade level also showed the difficulty in reading business news. The overall mean of Flesch-Kincaid grade level for six business news sources was 11.3 grade. While The New York Times showed the highest-grade level (11.8), The Wall Street Journal showed the lowest level (10.5) among the six business news sources. The difference among the six news outlets showed a significant difference with the ANOVA test (F (5, 354) = 14.179, p

Visual Difference

The three Web sites used considerably more visuals than did the three newspapers. Seventy visuals were used in the articles in CBSMW, 103 in CNBC and 79 in CNNfn. On the other hand, newspapers showed fewer visuals: The Wall Street Journal used 42, The Neiv York Times 56 and USA Today 38.

While all three Internet news sources mainly used the data visual formats, such as chart, table and graph, (CNBC, 80.6 percent; CBSMW, 64.3 percent; CNNfn, 53.2 percent), the three newspapers used photos as the main visual Type (The Wall Street Journal, 73.8 percent; The New York Times, 66.1 percent; USA Today, 50 percent). Based on the media type, differences in visual types were statistically significant (^sup c2^ (2, N = 388) = 96.547, p

Content Difference

Three Internet news sites focused heavily on stock market news: 41.7 percent in CBSMW, 56.7 percent in CNBC and 35 percent in CNNfn. They often reported individual firm stories following stock news. The three Internet sites rarely dealt with other news stories except stock market and individual firm news. In particular, combined across the three Web sites, industry news and legal issues were reported the least-each of them having less than 5 percent.

The three newspapers showed more diverse content than did Internet sites. In particular, The Wall Street Journal devoted 20.2 percent to national economy news, 18.3 percent in international news and 15 percent each to legal issues and executive news. International, legal and executive news in The Wall Street Journal received the highest proportion among the six news outlets' coverage. It also covered individual firm (8.3 percent) and industry news (13.3 percent). However, stock and consumer news were hardly seen on the The Wall Street Journal front page. USA Today also covered the national economy very often (21.7 percent) as did The Wall Street Journal; however, the overall coverage was quite different from that in The Wall Street Journal. In USA Today, industry news (21.7 percent) tied with national economy news. Following those two categories were executive news (13.3 percent), individual firm news (11.7 percent), stock market news (11.7 percent) and consumer news (10 percent). In The New York Times, the most frequently covered area was individual firm news (23.3 percent). Following this were industry news (16.7 percent), national economy (15 percent) and legal issues (13 percent) (^sup c2^ (40, N = 360) = 138.590, p

Discussion

Every journalism textbook urges students to write articles as concisely as possible. However, both newspapers and Internet news appear more difficult than does "standard" reading. This is consistent with previous newspaper readability studies.