Interessante Untersuchung der Medill School of Journalism: "Looking Local: Do Newspaper Web Sites Provide Community Information"?

We found in our research that most sites that provided local information were scattered, and many were not very complete," said Maria Neels (MSJ03). Her class's report, "Looking Local: Do Newspaper Web Sites Provide Community Information" found that newspaper search tools most often return results only from the newspapers article archive. "We were especially taken aback by the fact that most newspaper sites did not make local non-news information easy to access."

Assistant professor of new media Janice Castro said that newspapers are seeing increased competition from search engines such as Yahoo! or Google. "If readers turn to search engines to provide information about their local communities, this will undercut the newspaper business model," said Castro, who was the class' project director.

Solving this problem was the second part of the class capstone. The students created @Home Chicago," a Web site they hope newspapers use as a model for how to produce news and information down to the neighborhood level. Choosing Chicago neighborhood Wicker Park as their example, the site provides event listings, news, and an extensive business and service directory. "We were trying to provide a site that created a stronger sense of community in a neighborhood and that was a place where people could rely on and find the information they needed for a specific area," Neels said.

Hier gibt's die Studie als pdf: Looking Local: Do Newspaper Web Sites Provide Community Information?

Die Studenten sind aber nicht bei der Theorie und bei der Studie geblieben. Sie haben auch einen konkreten Vorschlag ausgearbeitet und eine Muster-Seite ins Netz gestellt: @Home Chicago.

[Via Poynter.org]