It's not the Internet - it's the broadband that makes online journalism truly interactive

摘要

Majority of Internet researchers as well as journalism scholars agree that the future of journalism is found on the Internet. One important characters of the Internet, or specifically, the World Wide Web, as a medium is interactivity. Many Web designers are taught to take advantage of this feature, and many communication scholars believe this should be expected from any given content on the World Wide Web.For countries with the same Internet penetration rate, it may be logical to expect online services, such as online newspapers, to have similar level of interactivity. However, the users of the Internet tend to be intolerable to waiting, allowing to make the prediction that interactive features that require long waiting time may not be welcomed by both the users and the online service providers. A comparative content analysis of three countries major online newspapers was conducted to confirm this. These countries (United States, Japan, and Korea) were close in their Internet penetration rate but Korea had extremely higher broadband penetration rate. As expected, Web pages of Korean online newspapers had significantly larger file sizes, and had more interactive features except for one occasion.