Enriching Rich Media on Media Web Sites

Enriching Rich Media on Media Web Sites

Edgar Huang

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis

Contact

Edgar Huang, Ph.D.

Associate Professor

New Media Program, School of Informatics

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis

535 W. Michigan Street, Suite IT 481

Indianapolis, IN 46202-3103

Phone: (317) 278-4108

Email:

Fax: (317) 278-7669

Edgar Huang (Ph.D., Indiana University, 1999) is an associate professor in the New Media Program under the School of Informatics, Indiana University–Purdue University Indianapolis. His articles on media convergence, copyright issues, online journalism, digital imaging, documentary photography, and the Internet and national development are seen in Convergence, IT for Development, Journalism and Communication Monographs, Visual Communication Quarterly, etc.

Enriching Rich Media on Media Web Sites

Abstract

A content analysis was conducted on four samples of U.S. newspaper Web sites and TV station Web sites to (1) explore the diffusion of the rich media technology among media Web sites, (2) examine the influence of rich media on the old habits of presenting news, and (3) provide guidelines for the media industry in developing rich media news content.

Introduction

Rich media refer to a broad range of interactive digital media such as video, audio and animation. The use of the term is often associated with online advertisement production. This paper limits the discussion to videos, audios and Flash animations used in or as the primary content of media Web sites. Media Web sites refer to U.S. newspaper Web sites and television (TV) station Web sites.

For roughly a decade, media Web sites have experimented with online video, audio and Flash animation technology for interactivity. The results of these experiments, mostly on video, have left much to be desired. For instance, news viewers could be easily annoyed by fuzzy videos in a tiny box, videos with frequent and long interruptions by something called buffering, or poor-quality mono-channel audio as experienced on CNN.com. Viewers who are still using a dial-up connection may wonder why the Virginian-Pilot’s Web (Pilotonline.com) staff is only concerned with viewers with a broadband connection. Impatient viewers may skip the video or audio completely when they receive a request to download a specific media player in order to view or listen to the content. If viewers click on a video in the San Diego Union-Tribune’s Web site SignOnSanDiego.com, they may be asked to either choose a media player (and the viewer may not know which media player to select because the site does not specify) to play their audios/videos (A/Vs) or download an A/V to their hard drive to listen to or view it. The long download time may irritate the viewer and push him/her away from such A/V content. In addition, downloaded A/Vs could consume a considerable amount of disk space on a hard drive. After several frustrating episodes, the viewer may decide not to touch any rich media content on particular sites ever again. Finally, if a Mac computer user is interested in a video news story on MSNBC.com, he or she may receive a short error message “Operating system not supported” because the site does not encode its Windows Media videos properly for Mac computers. Similar problems exist on ABC.com, CBSnews.com and USAToday.com. Many Mac computer users have to install Windows Media Player first to view the content on many of these news sites.

Media Web site developers, on their part, may have little time to produce stories or other programs using rich media, let alone produce that same content for different media players and different Internet access speeds and caption and describe these choices for better accessibility—all under daily deadline pressure. After going through such effort, they may wonder: Are we making money by providing such rich media service? Can viewers access our rich media? Does anyone really care if we do or do not provide such a service? Some media sites, such as the San Francisco Chronicle’s SFGate.com and OutdoorChannel.com have decided it is not worth the trouble and have produced no rich media.

This paper examined how media Web sites took advantage of rich media in their content productions and used them to maximize the potential of presenting news. It compared the rich media usage between newspaper sites and TV sites and between the top media sites and the overall population of media sites. A content analysis was conducted on four different samples of media sites. The goal was to provide technological guidelines to the media industry in their rich media development.

Literature Review

Finding viable solutions for applying rich media content to media Web sites is important for two reasons. First, rich media can enrich news writing and have the potential of becoming tomorrow’s way of reporting news. According to Storslee (2001), exposure to content in rich media formats enhances the cognitive processing of content resulting in improved retention. In the early years of online news presence, the use of rich media was rare. About two percent of local TV stations’ home pages incorporated audio elements and seven percent contained links to videos, according to Bates (1997). By 1998, fewer than 10 percent of the daily newspaper sites offered animated graphics, audio clips or video clips (Tankard, 1998). Zaharopoulos’s 2003 study based on a systematic random sample of 142 U.S. newspaper sites found that 12 percent of the sites carried audio clips and 13.7 percent had video clips. The adoption rate climbed slowly over those years. Tankard (1998) found that most online newspapers seemed to be relying heavily on content from their associated print newspapers. “Too many sites confuse shovelware[1] with online news,” said Adam Clayton Powell III, vice president for technology and programs at the Freedom Forum (Lanson, 2000). Some media professionals regard good writing as the sole criterion in judging the quality of online reporting and call rich media “added multimedia pizzazz” (Glaser, 2003). Roland De Wolk, producer at KTVU Investigative Reports and an online journalism professor at San Francisco State University, says, “Today, 90 percent of the content on the Web is text, but as the pipe grows fatter, text will become more of a supplement rather than the main meal… That old journalism adage, ‘Show, don’t tell,’ is best told in a broadband medium” (Lasica, 2000).[2]Washington Post reporter Lyndsey Layton believes that editors and publishers have to learn “to compete in a world in which faster computers and bigger ‘pipes’[3] will make online news truly multimedia news” (Lanson, 2000). Daniel Webster, West Coast vice president of The FeedRoom, also believes “the second wave of the Internet revolution will be a video and audio wave. Are we there yet? Not at all” (Lasica, 2000).

Second, the broadband surge has brought up more audience needs for rich media, especially videos. Online users’ craving for videos is not something new. During the 2000 presidential campaign, Michael Silberman, executive editor of MSNBC.com, observed that, on election night, 20 percent of the site’s 5.5 million visitors went to a video page to watch a video stream of election coverage, such as concession and acceptance speeches from around the country (ibid.). “That’s more than a million people who chose the Web over watching the coverage on their television sets. ‘That, to me, is a real sign that broadband has arrived,’ he said” (ibid.). “At MSNBC we think about broadband in two ways: as rich content, as video, as animation, about how we can combine those elements into a single experience,” Silberman said (ibid.). Over the last two years or so, Internet users in the United States and all around the world have been embracing broadband technology and rich media consumption at a faster speed. According to Nielsen/NetRatings, the number of U.S. at-home broadband users increased 36% in 2004, accounting for 55% of the total U.S. at-home users by the end of December (McGann, 2005b). A study by AccuStream iMedia Research (2005) found that the number of video streams increased 80.7% in 2004. Worldwide, broadband adoption grew even faster. The total number of broadband subscribers, as estimated by Point Topic, a U.K.-based company, exceeded 150 million by the end of December 2004, a year-over-year increase of approximately 50% (ibid.). By the end of 2005, worldwide broadband lines exceeded 205 million, as estimated by the same company (Burns, 2006a). A recent study shows that the consumption of streaming videos is positively correlated to whether the consumer has a broadband connection (McGann, 2005a).[4] McGann (ibid.) writes, “Broadband connections (defined as 100kps or higher) accounted for 79.3% of that [video] volume.” Research from Points North Group found, “As networks and other content creators line up to bring video to the Web, anticipation for rich media programs grows” (Burns, 2006b). As a result, many publishers have scrambled to redesign sites to deliver additional video content (Cohen, 2005). The rich media function of enhancing text and the audience’s increasing needs for rich media resulting from the broadband surge all point to an urgent need of a study on how to enrich rich media on media Web sites.

The extent to which a media Web site incorporates rich media has to do with a recent trend in the media industry—media convergence. Led by Time Warner-AOL, The Chicago Tribune, The New York Times and The News Center in Tampa, Florida, many news companies in the United States have either merged or collaborated in different ways to report news across media platforms (Huang et al., 2003). Media convergence via corporate merger constituted just 8.5% of the 714 commercial television stations in 210 designated market areas around the United States in 2003,[5] but convergence in the forms of content sharing and staff sharing, etc., has happened among many more companies. Huang et al. (2003) found in a national survey among newspapers and TV stations that roughly half of the news professionals surveyed (48%) reported that they produced news content for multiple media platforms on a routine basis both in merged media (50%) and non-merged media (48%).

Media convergence has been made possible by new technologies such as the Internet, streaming video and audio and networking infrastructure, but is technology dictating how messages are constructed? In the analog world, TV and newspapers have different platforms (paper and TV screen) to present content in different ways; but when content is presented on the Internet—a digital world made up of 1s and 0s—both can present not only text and photos but also rich media content. However, are newspaper Web sites and TV sites still sticking to their roles in the analog world? In other words, to what extent has new technology transformed media professionals’ mindsets for constructing media messages on the Internet? It is interesting to see to what point print, TV and the Web have been converged to tell stories and present programs at their full potential and to reach viewers with different needs.

This study is based on Everett M. Rogers’ diffusion of innovation theory. Rogers characterized varying degrees of user participation of technologies into five categories: laggards, late majority, early majority, early adopters and innovators (Rogers & Scott, 1997). Rogers described early adopters as “instrumental in getting an innovation to the point of critical mass, and hence, in the successful diffusion of an innovation” (ibid.). Rogers used the term “critical mass” to refer to the point at which enough individuals have adopted an innovation that the innovation's further rate of adoption becomes self-sustaining. The concept of the critical mass implies that outreach activities should be concentrated on getting the use of the innovation to the point of critical mass, usually reached between 10% to 20% (Mahler & Rogers, 1999). These efforts should be focused on the early adopters. After a critical mass is reached, the diffusion of innovation likely becomes irreversible (ibid.). Broadband technology adoption has long passed the critical mass, but is the diffusion of rich media content closely following the crest of the broadband surge? Is the diffusion of rich media trickling down from large media companies to the smaller ones? These are the questions this paper attempts to answer.

Methodology

The general research questions of this study were: How has rich media technology influenced the way news is presented online? To what extent are American media companies ready for a Web presentation paradigm shift or even a revolution that will bring viewers a truly converged media experience? These general questions were operationalized into the following specific research questions for observation:

  1. How extensively are rich media used across media Web sites?
  2. How many sites produce their own rich media? Do they use rich media to show content or to promote content?
  3. To what extent are rich media emphasized both quantitatively[6] and structurally?
  4. How have the media Web sites made it convenient for viewers to use rich media, such as providing large video sizes,[7] a full-screen viewing button, streaming and live webcast?
  5. How serious is the issue of media player compatibility across PC and Mac platforms?
  6. How do newspaper sites and TV broadcast network sites differ in using rich media content?
  7. How do top media sites and the overall population of media sites differ in using rich media?

Questions 1-5 were the factors to be measured, and Questions 6-7 were the contexts in which these factors were measured. Therefore, the findings report on the Question 6 and Question 7 will be mingled into the answers to the first five questions.

A content analysis was conducted on four samples of media Web sites. Two were samples of top media sites and the other two were overall samples of media sites in the nation.

  1. Top 100 newspaper sites in the United States. The Newspapers.com site has listed 100 newspapers with the largest circulations in the United States.[8] All 100 sites were included in the observation. To some extent, this sample is a census.
  2. TV station sites from the top 25 Designated Market Areas (DMA) in the United States.[9] The TV industry has 210 designated market areas. The bigger a market is, the more TV homes can access programs from those TV stations, the more profit those TV stations can reap, and the more likely those TV stations are to invest in new technology. In total, there were 706 TV stations in the top 25 DMA. A systematic random sample of 141 stations was drawn from them.[10]
  3. Overall newspaper sites in the United States. A systematic random sample of 229 newspaper sites was drawn from a total of 1,190 U.S. dailies listed under Newslink.org.[11]
  4. Overall TV station sites in the United States. TVRadioWorld.com included a total of 1,576 TV station sites in the United States that had a unique Web site. A list of all TV station sites from each state was compiled from the TVRadioWorld.com site. All 1,576 stations were alphabetically sorted. Then, a systematic random sample of 309 sites was drawn from the list.

The sample sizes were roughly based on the recommendations made by Patten (2000, p. 132) in the chart listing the proportion of each specific population to its corresponding sample size.

From October to December of 2005, each site was visited both on a PC and a Mac to observe performance consistency across platforms. Both the Mac and the PC used for coding were advanced computers and had the latest versions of Windows Media Player, Real Player, Flash Player and QuickTime Player, the latest operating systems, and the latest versions of major Web browsers installed. Both coding computers had a 5Mbps broadband maximum downloading speed from a cable modem.

Two coders coded these sites. The intercoder reliability index using Scott’s Pi was 0.88. The coders took notes during coding to record any significant observations on individual sites. The unit of analysis was each piece of audio clip, video clip and Flash animation. Both descriptive and inferential statistical procedures were applied.

Findings

The reporting of the findings will be based on the first five specific research questions. The last two questions concerning comparisons across newspaper sites and TV station sites and across top sites and overall sites will be included in the report on the first five questions. All observations of individual sites are based on the observation notes taken during coding.

  1. How extensively are rich media used across media Web sites?

By the end of November 2005, media convergence endeavors in the nation had tasted their initial fruit on the Web. Rich media usage across newspaper sites and TV station sites was loosely chasing the broadband connection expansion in American homes (See Figure 1). That was especially true among top newspaper sites (42%) and on TV station sites (47.9%), where the use of video content had passed the point of critical mass and was getting close to 50%. Among overall American newspaper sites (10.9%), rich media usage was still gaining momentum.