ABSTRACT
In just over a decade the news website has become a familiar feature of the news environment. There is no consensus about exactly when the first news outlet went online. Some suggest it was as early as 1990 in the United States, when seven newspapers could be accessed over the internet (Gunter, 2003). Others put forward the slightly later date of 1992 (Li, 2006). Much of the initial expansion, though, took place after the emergence of the World Wide Web and the dotcom boom of the late 1990s, which saw established news organizations invest millions of dollars in their web operations. An indication of the rapid expansion can be given through a quick survey of some figures. In 1994, 60 newspapers in the United States had websites. By 1998, depending on the source, there were between 1,600 and 2,000 newspapers with their own sites (Greer and Mensing, 2006;
Li, 2006), and all of the main news organizations had a website displaying news content by 1995 (Scott, 2005; Sparks, 2000). By 2002 the number of newspapers online had grown to 3,400 in the United States and 2,000 outside the United States (Gunter, 2003), although some put the figure higher. Li (2006), for instance, suggests that there are as many as 4,000 newspapers online in the United States, not counting other news outlets. At the same time as the number of
internet news sites expanded so has the audience for online news (see Deuze, 2003). Table 15.1 shows that the proportion of people who regularly consume news online grew by 29 percent from 1996 to 2006, while those using traditional offline outlets declined, though it should be noted that for many the internet complements offline news consumption and is not a substitute for it (see Ahlers, 2006).
