We looked at an article in the Post Dispatch titled "Floods but hard-drive supply." It talked about the business problems for hard-drive manufactures caused by the flooding in Thailand.
The print version of the article that we looked at consisted of a three-column story with a picture and caption. This article was actually taken from the Associated Press.
The online version that was posted on stltoday.com was the exact same article without a picture. There were multiple social media aspects allowing users to share the article on facebook, twitter, blogspot, etc. There was also an area to post comments. We also noticed that the article had been updated about 18 hours after it had been posted.
As we continued looking for this article, we found the same article on yahoo.com. There was a difference, though. On Yahoo, the article was longer. So, the Post Dispatch chose to cut out some of the information before they printed or posted the article.
We looked back at stltoday.com again and noticed that there were very similar articles on the website posted a few days earlier. These were listed at the bottom of the page of the first online article we looked at. One of these articles was the same as the one printed in the paper and the first online article, but it had more information (like the article on Yahoo). This article also had the same picture that was printed in the paper. Another article similar to our first article was extremely condensed and only talked about one aspect of the issue.
We noticed a lot of cutting of text to fit the purpose of the different articles and the different news sources. Social media aspects were also used quite a bit.
Good observations. It seems this was a case of shovelware. They used the same story in print and online with minor differences. However, the online version has more depth because of the hyperlinks within the text of the story; addition of social media icons; and it allowed for comments which led to an update in the story 18 hours after the original post.
ReplyDeleteGood job.