Saturday, November 8, 2014

Overview of The Courier Journal

The Courier-Journal, the only print news source that our class followed, seemed to have done the best job. But how did its print stories match up with its online stories?
The Courier-Journal had a total of 325 local stories with 114 of those stories in print and 211 being online. The fact that there was so much more online can be kind of concerning to a certain extent, but if you count the fact that the website has more room for stories and the majority of the stories were fluff (we'll get to that later) then the Courier-Journal didn't do too horrible on keeping things proportionate. The Courier-Journal had a total of 194 national stories with 107 being print and 87 being online. It had a total of 49 international stories with 31 being print and 18 being online. With most of the stories being local, the Courier-Journal did a pretty good job at staying true to its local relevance. 
Now on to the categories~

  • Accidents, Disasters- 6 total, 5 in print, 1 online 
  • Politics, Government- 76 total, 34 in print, 42 online 
  • Crime- 47 total, 29 in print, 18 online
  • War, Diplomacy- 8 total, 8 in print, 0 online
  • Business, Economy- 119 total, 67 in print, 52 online 
  • Social Issues, Human Interest, Education- 127 total, 60 in print, 67 online 
  • Health, Consumer, Environment- 54 total, 21 in print, 33 online 
  • Celebrity, Fluff, Other- 122 total, 20 in print, 102 online
All the categories, except Celebrity, Fluff, Other, seemed to have a somewhat balance between the number of online and print stories, which is good. These categories also had a reasonable number of stories relating to their topics, for example, it is good that there were a lot of stories pertaining to economy (something that could affect the people) while there weren't nearly as many crime stories (something that people want to hear about and usually should, but usually doesn't affect them in any way besides implanting fear in their brains).
And then there's the fluff. While the number of fluff in print wasn't horrendously high for the number of times we studied the Courier-Journal, the number online was absolutely outrageous. One hundred and two fluff stories online; that was more than any of the other categories number of online stories! The Courier-Journal really needs to experience a monumental decrease in its number of online fluff stories if it wants its website to be just as good as its actual print news. 

Link to one of the many fluff stories


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