FACULTY OF HUMANITIES UNIVERSITY OF COPENH AGEN PhD dissertation Aske Kammer News on the Web: instantaneity, multimodality, interactivity, and hypertextuality on Danish news websites News on the Web Instantaneity, multimodality, interactivity, and hypertextuality on Danish news websites Aske Kammer 1 Name of department: Department of Media, Cognition, and Communication, University of Copenhagen Author: Aske Kammer Title: News on the Web: instantaneity, multimodality, interac- tivity, and hypertextuality on Danish news websites Academic advisor: Stig Hjarvard Submitted: January 31, 2013 © Aske Kammer, 2013 Cover illustration by Jørn Villumsen. © Politiken, December 13, 2009. Reprinted with permission. 2 This dissertation is dedicated to Laurids Søndergaard Christensen (1936-2012) and Sigrid Kammer (1934-2012), both of whom I lost while writing it, and to Regitze, whom I grew even closer to. 3 4 Acknowledgements This dissertation is the result of work funded by a three years PhD scholarship from The Danish Council for Independent Research | Humanities and housed by the Department of Media, Cognition, and Communication at the University of Co- penhagen. The research project has received additional financial support from the Foundation of the Danish Newspaper Publishers’ Association (Dagspressens Fond), The Oticon Foundation, the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University Steinhardt, The Danish National Research School for Me- dia, Communication, and Journalism (which is now closed), and the Department of Media, Cognition, and Communication. Former CNN journalist Peter Bergen (2012: 341) recently noted that “Nonfiction book writing is a strange combination of the intensely solitary–no one is going to write the book for you–and the profoundly collective”. That is also the case for re- search and academic writing, and this dissertation was, of course, not written without input from others. A number of news workers, who on a daily basis pro- duce the news on the web, generously shared their time, knowledge, and perspec- tives with me. Without their interest in and support of my work and willingness to discuss their own, the dissertation would have been short of important insights into why news on the web is as it is, and what motivations news workers have, so I deeply appreciate these contributions. In particular, I thank the 13 news workers with whom I conducted proper interviews. Also Anders Refnov and Thomas Willman from Ekstra Bladet, who provided me with recordings of audio-visual 5 content that I would otherwise not have been able to capture or recreate, deserve special recognition for their help. Furthermore, a large number of persons and more or less formal associations from the academic community have contributed with constructive criticism and new, productive perspectives throughout the process. Even though I am responsible for all parts of the dissertation, it has undoubtedly benefitted from their input, and I am grateful to all of them. They are (in alphabetical order): Jens Barland, Rodney Benson, Niels Brügger, Henrik Bødker, Andreas Gregersen, Jannie Møller Hartley, Rasmus Helles, Elin Strand Hornnes, Klaus Bruhn Jensen, Nete Nørgaard Kristensen, Stine Lomborg, Melissa Lucas, Susan E. McGregor, Annette Markham, Brian Petersen, Line Nybro Petersen, Kim Christian Schrøder, Inge Ejbye Sørensen, the members of the research groups Digital Communication and Aesthetic and The Mediatization of Culture as well as the research priority area Creative Media Industries (all three at the Department of Media, Cognition, and Communication), the Habermas study group, and the Nordic Research Network in Journalism Stud- ies (headed by Sigurd Allern). I apologize to anyone I might have forgotten. A big thank you also goes to my anonymous peers, who have reviewed the research arti- cles, as well as to my diligent student assistants Mette Birk, Stephanie Heimann, Henrik Richter Schie, Pernille Schmidt, and Anne Rosa Simonsen, who have taken care of the transcription of research interviews and the quantitative coding of the news websites’ use of the four affordances. Two persons, however, deserve my most profound gratitude: The first one is Professor Stig Hjarvard from the Department of Media, Cognition, and Communication who has been the supervisor of this PhD project just as he was on my master thesis before that. This time around as well, I have benefitted tremendously from his critical, intellectually challenging, and knowledgeable men- toring. My humble hopes are that the collaboration has also been rewarding the other way around, and that it will not be the last. The other one is my wife Regitze. Of all the happiness of my life, I owe the most to her. 6 Table of contents Introduction ....................................................................................................... 9 Context of the dissertation ....................................................................................... 11 Previous research ...................................................................................................... 15 Hypothesis, research questions, and approach ..................................................... 25 Character and structure of the dissertation .......................................................... 29 Terminology ..................................................................................................... 35 Journalism and news ................................................................................................ 35 Internetization, internet, and web .......................................................................... 37 News on the web ..................................................................................................... 39 News websites .......................................................................................................... 39 Theoretical framework .................................................................................... 43 An institutional perspective on journalism ........................................................... 44 Mediatization ............................................................................................................ 53 The four affordances of news websites .................................................................. 58 1. Instantaneity .................................................................................................... 62 2. Multimodality .................................................................................................. 64 3. Interactivity ..................................................................................................... 67 4. Hypertextuality ............................................................................................... 69 A media logic of news websites ............................................................................... 71 Research design ................................................................................................ 73 Subtle realism .......................................................................................................... 74 Content analysis ...................................................................................................... 78 Case studies ............................................................................................................. 85 Semi-structured lifeworld interviews .................................................................... 87 Quality control: validity and reliability .................................................................. 91 Research article 1: Ownership, legacy media, and the use of affordances on news websites .............................................................................................. 95 Research article 2: News Websites’ Real-Time Coverage of Emergent Crisis: a Scandinavian study ..................................................................................... 119 Research article 3: Former for læserdeltagelse i netavisernes nyhedspro- duktion ........................................................................................................ 141 Research article 4: The mediatization of journalism .................................... 165 Conclusion ....................................................................................................... 187 Contributions .......................................................................................................... 190 Further research ...................................................................................................... 191 References ....................................................................................................... 195 Summary .......................................................................................................... 221 Dansk resumé ................................................................................................. 222 7 8 Introduction ”The turning point for this new medium came after the bombs in the London tube. Many of our London based bloggers [...] send in their reactions in real-time, almost while it happened. I was having my morning coffee and read the New York Times, which had a front page photo of Londoners celebrating that they’d won the right to host the Olympics. And I thought it is such a different picture we’re seeing now. It gave me a sense of how anachronistic the daily newspaper has become, of how you’re really holding