“Rather then being delivered as the only and true version of reality, news stories on the Internet have more of a provisory multi-meaning characteristic to them,” Michael Karlsson concludes in his doctoral dissertation at Lund University. “If this is practised in most online journalism, we may stand on a brink of a new kind of journalism and journalistic norms,” he goes on.

Karlsson studied four leading Swedish news sites in 2004-2005. What he found looks like a good snapshot of the state of online news in Scandinavia, though things might be changing now:

Interaction is widely present in the form of hyperlinks and e-mailing opportunities, but it does not take the form of public conversational interaction. There is not one single instance in the study where readers and publishers meet in a public dialogue about news content. This shows that it is still the producers that are heard in the news, although the technical means allow consumers to be heard.

What online news editors definitely should take note of, is Karlsson’s criticism of certain practices that might seem logical to journalists and editors, but can make the experience of using online news exasperating, confusing and almost surreal:

• The news is updated without readers being aware
• The author of the article changes
• Sources come and go
• The meaning of the news changes
• News stories disappear from the website
• Pictures and graphics are changed or removed
• Information that is promised is not delivered

An important point here must be to note that bloggers often are more reliable when it comes to linking to sources, telling readers why elements disappear (the practice of striking out errors instead of just removing them), etc. There’s an ideology of transparency and etiquette among bloggers that journalists might do well to copy.

Karlsson’s dissertation in full text (10,2 MB PDF!). There’s a longer English summary from page 213.