Genre characteristics - a front page analysis of 85 Swedish online newspapers

The online newspapers entered the Internet in the mid-nineties and since then it has become more and more common to read news online. There is a long tradition of designing newspapers in print but today there is a demand from both academics and practitioners for more knowledge about how to design user friendly news sites. The challenge is to design the online newspaper, in this rapidly changing media, to be the same familiar, user friendly and universally accepted product as the printed newspaper. We have designed a study in three parts to address this challenge. The overall research question is: How can design for a media in rapid development be communicated within a genre? The purpose of the first part of the study, presented in this paper, is to build a framework for identifying genre characteristics and to describe the Swedish online newspaper genre of today. We have conducted a front page analysis on the total population of 85 Swedish online newspapers. We suggest a quadruple of the genre concepts and a grid to handle positioning when building the framework. To describe the Swedish online newspaper genre we have used the taxonomy for the evolution of cybergenres together with the so called broadsheet metaphor. Aiming at a more comprehensive understanding of the online newspaper genre we modified the model by adding the leaf node 'progressed'.