Multimedia in the Mainstream: Analyzing Legacy News Traditions in Online Journalism

Abstract

Newspapers, radio stations, and television stations are balancing the demands of a legacy product with the demands of putting material on the Web. Today information can be conveyed in multiple content forms--text, images, sound, motion, graphics--and received by the consumer through multiple modalities--seeing, hearing, reading. It is the combination of these content forms that allows producers to create multimedia presentations for an audience previously limited to the narrower choices offered by legacy media. The Spokesman Review, The Roanoke Times, The Detroit Free Press, The New York Times; CNN, MSNBC, News10 (Syracuse, NY), KGW (Portland, OR); NPR, KCBS (San Francisco) and NHPR (New Hampshire) are the subjects of a content analysis examining the formats and characteristics of these multimedia presentations. These news entities are putting multimedia content to work on websites, but often rely heavily upon and therefore reflect their textual, visual or aural heritage. This "legacy effect" can be an asset or a detriment to a news organization depending on the attitudes of producers and managers.