The Distinctive Nature of Making News Online

This book provides an inside, in-depth look at how journalists at latimes.com and salon.com came together to create content for their websites over a six month period. It vividly unveils the process of newsmaking by journalists working for organisations whose output is the world wide web. It uses mixed method case studies of two US-based news websites, latimes.com and salon.com, to show how both parentage and net native sites construct a news story. The case studies include direct observation, in-depth interviews and content analysis to deconstruct the process of covering the 2008 Presidential election. The book works around Brian McNair’s cultural chaos paradigm (2006) which explains the emergent nature of news online and the lack of control by any environmental factors that seek to affect its outcome.