PROVIDERS

Traditional mainstream general news providers (definition) should be heartened by the findings of the Stanford-Poynter study. Though they constituted only a third of the total news-provider sites, they were the most active sites for our 67 subjects.

More subjects visited each of the mainstream sites, spent more time with them, and revisited each more often than was true for other sites. Additionally, they were often the first ones called up.

Our definition of "mainstream general news provider" includes national newspapers and broadcasters, local newspapers and local broadcasters, and the few customized news sites, all of which offer a range of general news. There were 70 of these out of a total 211 unique providers visited. If we were to include the 49 specialty providers, who often are "traditional" news providers such as the Wall Street Journal, then traditional news providers represented 54 percent of the total 211 providers called up.

On average, each subject called up six different providers in a single session that, on average, lasted 34 minutes. Counting each participant's visit to a provider only once gave us 426 unique visits to the 211 providers. Counting revisits, participants returned to providers 610 times.

Of the 610 visits, 59 percent returned to general news mainstream providers. The bulk of revisits were also to these same providers. Were we to add specialty providersto the count of traditional providers, the total for revisits reaches 75 percent.

A few more findings: 79 percent of first providers visited were general news mainstream providers; 64 percent of returns to an individual provider one or more times within one session were to these same first providers.

Patterns for favored providers

The following breakdown shows the patterns for the top nine providers favored by our subjects. Note that all are general news mainstream sites--7 newspaper sites. 2 broadcast sites: (Keep in mind that our subjects were located equally in two cities: Chicago and St. Petersburg. See Study chapter.)

Since our software let us follow subjects' movements from site to site, we analyzed their transits from one provider to another, then back again. We concluded that many revisited sites were generalized transportation hubs to other sites. Reasons for leaving and returning to a provider included: choosing specific content-related hyperlinks; searching for related but not hyperlinked information; typing in information, as in answering polls; and downloading information to send emails to friends and colleagues.

This interlacing pattern seems to indicate that providers need not fear that subjects are gone for good whenever they leave a site.

Forty percent of our subjects started a session with their local newspaper or broadcast provider before moving on.

Here we should explain our coding categories. "Local," uppercase, indicates papers that are local to our research participants. When we have used "local" lowercased, we have been generalizing that the newspaper or broadcast site has only local distribution. A more detailed breakdown on how we categorized news providers follows:

Provider categories break down

We coded seven types: National, Local, Customized, Hometown, Specialty, Foreign, and Non-Traditional.

National: sites such as NYTimes, Washingtonpost, ABCNews, or Msn.com.

Local: used to categorize only those sites local to our research locations, as the Chicago Sun-Times, the Chicago Tribune, and the Chicago Reader in Chicago.

Hometown: sites local to a given area and not considered National. For example: Boston Globe, Modesto Bee, Access Atlanta.

Customized: includes sites like MyYahoo or MyNetscape.

Specialty: sites such as CNNfn, ESPN, Armytimes, LawNewsNetwork, Zdnet.

Non-Traditional: those that do not fit traditional news definitions, such as Walgreens.com; or The Bag Ladys Cart.com.

Foreign: any site outside the U.S., such as BBC or Gazeta Wyborcza (Poland). Canadian providers are also labeled Foreign.

To clarify again, when referring to "mainstream general news" providers we are including National, Local, Hometown, and Customized categories. These categories offered a cross section of current news including international, national, local, sports, lifestyle, etc.

When we refer to "traditional" news providers, we intend "Mainstream" and "Specialty" combined. If we use the term "non-standard" provider, we refer to Foreign, and Non-Traditional categories.

It might be useful to debate whether "specialty providers" should be integrated with "mainstream." Most do present news in traditional manners. And, we noticed that our subjects read many national issues through a specialty filter. However, for the purposes of our current study, we decided to consider "Specialty" providers separately.

Using our definition for "mainstream general news" providers, our subjects spent more time with these than with either specialty or non-standard providers. The maximum time spent with these last two providers was 20 minutes, while the maximum time with general news providers was 46 minutes.

Common explanations for reading local papers not Local to the two cities where the research took place were: "that's my hometown"; "I have relatives/friends who live there"; "I used to live there"; "I have a colleague traveling there right now." People wanted to have some common ground for interacting with persons in these other locations.

Complete List of the 211 providers

You will find the complete list of the 211 individual provider sites viewed by our 67 subjects.