The online news genre through the user perspective

Online newspapers, having existed on the Internet for a couple of years, are now having similar form and content, starting to shape what could be called a genre. We have analyzed the news sites of nine Swedish local newspapers using a repertoire of genre elements consisting of navigation elements, landmarks, news streams, headlines, search/archives and advertisements. We have also interviewed 153 end users at these newspapers. The objective of this paper is to describe the user's perspective of the online news genre described in terms of the repertoire of genre elements. The results indicate what elements seems to be the better design choice through the user perspective. Due to remaining similarities with the printed edition, the online newspaper genre is still a variant genre.