Readers and Online News Websites

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Abstract

This paper will be a case study of News.com.au. The objective will be to use this site to explore some of the factors mentioned above. It will show that the success of online broadcasts relies on more than just the readers. The paper will also take into account the thoughts of the readers on their role in that success, and members of the site’s staff on the news and the new developments they wish to adopt.

This will be done through a questionnaire. The paper will also explore the organization and structure of News.com.au website, and how this helps it sell itself to the readers.

Introduction

With the prevalence of online media today, more and more media houses are going online. Not only are new media houses adopting online broadcasting, but the ones that are already online are increasing their online portals. These media houses hope to retain their customers.

Their adoption of online media is an attempt to chase after their customers who are already on line, as well as winning new online users. The participation of readers is pivotal for the success of the sites (Cushion 2001; Cameron 2000).

Based on their perceptions on the sites, the readers could inform other people; their friends, families, workmates, et cetera. Although getting more people coming in is a good thing, the real question is not whether a person logs in, but whether he/she keeps returning to the portal. Retaining old customers makes it possible to identify the new readers, and to evaluate whether the portal is popular amongst readers (Emmerichs et al 2004).

Background

News.com is an organization of editors based in Sydney. It has a large number of online editors who manage its work in many cities and mast-head sections all over the world (Burden 2008; Chappel 2000, p. 12). It has reporters and newspapers that contribute greatly in many states including territories all over Australia and goes further to include correspondents from different parts of the world (Chaston 1999, p. 34).

In Asia, it has correspondents from various cities that include Beijing in China, Bangkok in Thailand, Tokyo in Japan and Jakarta in Indonesia. In Europe, London takes the lion share and takes the representation of United Kingdom and the larger European continent. In the United States, the cities of Washington, Wellington, New York and Los Angeles have been inhabited by the correspondents of this organization (Chaston 1999, p. 30).

It has in the last decade drawn its global power of incorporating news and the act of gathering parallel news from News Limited. This is the largest new gathering network in Australia (De Botton 2002; Denu 2011).

Within its rank, is an out-and-about team of online reporters who work hard to contribute their daily reports to the millions of the Australian population (Little 2007, p. 41; Alysen 2002, p. 35).It presents the content it gathers from the vast network of the News Limited network which has in its ranks news on a range issues such as business, weather, entertainment, and sports.

The portal makes almost minute to minute update of its news. For example, it can be noticed that the Breaking News column in the News.com.au bears headlines only minutes apart (Young 2007).

It has a wide range of contributing factors in its daily to daily news that range from newspapers which include the daily telegraph, the advertiser, the Australian, the herald sun, the Sunday times, the courier mail and the mercury. The posting of the newspapers is done every night at around 2am.

The reporting teams give an update on the events that happen each and every-day, and get its daily update from its efficiently developed network of printing activities and the other resources of the associated press of Australia and other press resources like the Agence France-Presse and the associated press (Erdelez 1995).

Literature review

Print media thrive on readership. As has been briefly mentioned above, media houses count on readers to keep their sites running. Variety and the consequent competitiveness helped by the internet makes it necessary for these media houses to adopt suitable ways to attract and retain more readers.

For this reason, various media houses have adopted a number of audience-based tactics. Since the primary objective is to win and retain these customers, the news content, which is the primary product that these media houses are selling, becomes only a small part of the overall methods used to win readers (Valentine 2011, p. 65).

For instance, Bowman and Willis (2003, p. 7) pointed out how MSNBC.com, CNN, Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal offered their readers certain degrees of personalization on their sites’ front pages. Personalization means that readers can customize the portals to satisfy some of their tastes.

Also another phenomenon of online activity is what Erdelez (1995, p. 20) referred to as information encountering. This is the ability of the internet to get readers to news without them really intending to. This thrives upon the opportunistic reading habits and emotional response of the readers.

Tewksbury et al. (2001, p. 34) argued that due to the prevalence of news online, many people come by news items without necessarily setting out to find the news. In the same line, Nguyen (2008) agrees that the structure of online media has facilitated unintended encounter of news and its reading.

What these examples reveal is that it is not only the place of readers to keep the get to the site. While the end target is humans, there are other elements of the internet that helps keep the sites running. The irony here is that people may not really go to the site for the purpose of reading the news, but maybe to reach a gateway to other portals.

But the fact still remains that they have gotten the readers to their site. Another Irony is that the very nature of internet structure that leads readers to these sites may be the same thing that directs them away. Nonetheless, the case of New.com.au shows clearly just how important readers are to keeping news website running.

News.com.au has also adopted a readers-centered tactic of retaining its readers. This has involved different forms of reader-participation. For instance, readers participate in the site by posting their comments on various issues on the company site.

These posts include the reader’s reaction(s) to various issues, including the news or certain new adoptions in the site-structure and organization, amongst others. This paper will show that this reader-centered tactic is having a positive effect on winning readers to their online portal.

As it were, this tactic has been a direct way to hear what the readers want from their own lips. The company has an online portal dedicated to collecting the readers’ views fro critical assessment and evaluation. It has constantly used the information from the readers to know what they perceive as negative and make necessary adjustments.

In other words, the company realizes and acknowledges the role of the readers in keeping their site running. Their primary goal then becomes satisfying the readers (Goggin 2001, p. 44).

It is as if the company has explicitly set out to answer a question it has set itself: How do we expect to have the most captivating news when the readers do not have the right platforms to express themselves and air their satisfactions or dissatisfactions?

A good media house cannot emerge without the resurgent action of its readers, so the readers ought to be given the chance to help the media houses online make the right decisions and changes (Heracleous, Wirtz & Pangarkar 2006; Berridge 2007).

Research Questions

The research seeks to answer the question like; how has the general setting of the online portal of the News.com.au helped it win and keep readers? And what other new tactics should the company adopt to ensure that it retains a close relation with its readers?

Methodology

The research made use of multiple methods of data collection, including where experimentation, surveys, questionnaires and observation of the site to enhance the accuracy and reproducibility of the results, and to increase the likeliness of getting more results from other sources relating to online media organization, especially News.com.au (Karol & Nelson 2007).

Experimentation: the research emphasized on studying the trend of relations between the readers and the organization.

For instance, the number of readers who have visited their websites of the organization, what kinds of comments the readers have made: positive or negative, and how these comments have influenced certain changes in the site, and the company’s general operations. The decisions of the managers and the readers’ involvement in online media were used for the experimentation (Gillespie, Jeannette & Hennessey 2010).

Some of the data was obtained from the company’s history from the company website sites. Other data that was gotten from the company website including the recent activities of the company and what the managers have done to deal with the pressure of the increasing online readership and how they have reacted to the different comments.

The correspondence between the company and the readers on the company website was equally witnessed. Moreover, more data was gotten from the company’s history, its position on online reading and the effects it has had on the general online media broadcasts from other secondary results like journals and magazines (Atwood 2007; Cohen 2011).

Surveys

Questionnaires were used to interview specific groups of people over the internet. The different questions that were required for the research were composed and sent to the News Limited office in Australia via email. In this case, the researcher identified the target group from the players within this organization.

Since these persons were located in various places around Australia, the internet was the only effective means of communicating with them. Questionnaires were developed on word format and sent to the identified study group, which included the managers and the executive chairman of the organization who had been consulted before the study. As already stated, the questionnaires were sent over through email.

The results were received back from these persons by the same means. This study identified 40 potential interviewees who signed consent forms, received the questionnaire over the net, but only 35 of them returned the questionnaires. Out of the 35 returned questionnaires, 2 were found ineligible for the study. In the end, only 33 of the of the study sample were eligible for the study (MacGinley 2004; Erdley & Kesterson 2002).

The annual reports released by News.com Australian media for the last five years shows their performances regarding the number of online readers who visited its online portal. I obtained permission to study the data from the organization which had been identified as the study center and place.

The researcher sought for permission from the managers and the various stakeholders of the organization. The executive chairman was the main person contacted with a request to allow an explicit study on his organization on their activities and everything revolving around their reader-data collection methods. The permission was granted.

These study populations formed the first study section, where the causes of the divergent opinions and comments in the online Medias were determined. These study populations were considered for the qualitative research, given that the study was both quantitative and qualitative. For the quantitative research, the researcher sent questionnaires to the main organization offices in Australia.

Because all the study populations identified in this research understood and used English, the questionnaires were in English language. The researcher obtained important financial aid from the professionals working at the News.com.au branch in the region.

The study targeted the organization, which, it felt, was the best in Australia- being the major media house in Australia (Kenyon 2008; Austin 2010). The data was not tampered with in for one month that data collection was carried out.

The qualitative data was cumulated in individual’s interviews and then documented. For the Quantitative data, the questionnaires were gathered by the researcher and distributed through email to the staff of News.com.au. Responses were collected via the email (Bunzel 2000; Karol & Nelson 2007).

Data analysis

Statistical data analysis tools and procedures were used to derive information from the data obtained in the questionnaires. Specifically, the Statistical Packages software as well as the Microsoft access and database tools was used for the study. The data analysis procedure was done within a period of one week which was well within the stipulated time (Donald & Keane 2002; Bowman & Willis 2003).

The questionnaires were responded to according to the instructions given. On analyzing the questionnaires, it was revealed that there were several positive questions for the researched organization. The organization conveyed that there was an average of more than 5% difference between the comments and the opinions which the online readers gave out in 2009.

The difference rose by 6 percent in 2010.

The organization further reported that they had a negative difference when handling readers from other countries who had read and sampled its news portal, mainly because it was not so enriched in terms of experience compared to other well established media sites in Australia like the News Limited which has acted as an all-time leading online portal in the past decade (Newton & Morrison 2007, p. 45).

Most readers preferred other up to date and the emerging news precisely the political news.

Study results

The research found out that the organization had taken into key consideration the increased feedbacks and the opinions that it received from its daily readers through their portal. As the managers explained in their questionnaires, this had impacted greatly on the company positively since they were able to receive prompt feedbacks when an error occurred in their site.

For instance, whenever their broadcast is not streaming properly, they have learnt it from the readers and used the information to avert and counter the problem promptly. And by observing the website and witnessing the correspondence between the readers and the site staff, it was noticed that the handlers of the portal responded promptly to the readers’ questions and comments (Berridge 2007; Bretford 2010).

Conclusion

After the end of research on the organization and the readers’ participation on online media, it can be concluded that each and every media that feeds news to the people through an online platform should instill efficient platforms where readers’ can air and interact directly with the organization, for example, the help-platform in the organization’s website.

The use of online feeds will give the readers a one-on-one platform to air their opinions: satisfactions and dissatisfactions, and their views on various pieces of information.

For an efficient growth of the online Media, the readers should be allowed to be involved in the day to day running of the organization. The research also found out that news.com had involved their online readers a lot and this had been a major help to their immense growth in the past decade (Young 2007).

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