Media Blog

The first obvious difference between the print edition of the New York Times on November 10, 2009 and the online edition of both the New York Times and USA Today is that in the print edition, there is much more body content of the stories. Online, the New York Times does a very good job at keeping the ledes to the more important stories short, sweet and still interesting to the reader in order that they might click on the link and read more of the story. USA Today has no ledes on its website, just links to the stories.

On the online versions of the newspapers, there are many more pictures to help aid in the telling of a story. On print edition of the New York Times, the pictures are much bigger in order to draw the attention to the story. Online, however, there are more pictures to help tell the story and this makes up for the lack of print on the actual page. The online versions of the newspapers seem to be supplementing pictures for text so that readers who are just “cruising” on the internet can catch a glimpse of story and decide whether they want to read it or not. In the print edition of the New York Times, editors can assume that people who are reading the newspaper have time to actually sit down and read it. Because of this, there is more text on the front page so the reader can receive more information from about the story. The online versions need their pictures so that readers can have a faster glance of the story without having to read too much into it, but if the reader so chooses, they can also click on the links to the stories and read on.

Concerning the writing-style approaches that were used within the three editions of newspapers, the online newspapers seemed to be able to contain more information and more quotes because they do not require such a strict command on space. The print edition, however, has to follow a much more rigid structure to be able to fit inside of the newspapers’ printed capacity. USA Today’s articles, however, are much shorter in comparison to the online edition of the New York Times. It seems that the goal of USA Today is to just say exactly what happened and remain as objective as possible.

As far as commentary goes, I felt that USA Today handled that the best what with their articles being so short and simply reporting the facts. The articles were presented in a simple manner and basically just “told it how it was” without delving too deep into it. As for both editions of the New York Times, I felt that they were trying to cram a little more insight into the articles. They have different views from many different people from different backgrounds as compared to USA Today. As to whether which newspaper is more biased, I do not know.