In 1994, the year Xigen Li left his homeland, a worldwide virtual revolution was in the making. It was the fledgling Internet, and Li soon realized that it had the potential to fundamentally change the way people received information from the media.

A veteran of both print and broadcast media in China, Li came to the United States to pursue a doctorate in mass media—just at the time that news organizations were making their tentative debuts online.

"Because it was so new, I was at the same level as everybody else with the Internet," says Li, now an assistant professor of journalism at SIUC. "But when I began using it to get news from newspapers published anywhere in the world, that opened my eyes to begin thinking about the new Internet newspaper."

His interest and years of research have resulted in a new book, Internet Newspapers: The Making of a Mainstream Medium, published by Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Li edited this collection of research papers and authored or co-authored several of them.

"These are the most prominent researchers in the U.S. on this issue," Li says of the book's contributors.

The book examines how online news delivery affects audiences, society, and other media. It looks at how consumers of Internet news make choices and interact with the new medium. And it gives tips on improving the operation and performance of Internet newspapers to better serve the public and to gain a competitive edge in the industry.

Li says the book also seeks to find whether or to what extent the standard paradigms of the traditional media apply to the Internet age, and if not, whether new ones are emerging.

For example, one of the traditional theories of mass communication is that media organizations set the agenda for the public in various ways. Newspapers place stories the editors think are most important on the front page; broadcasters air the stories they consider most important early in the program. The media also signal the importance of an issue through repeated coverage and through editorials.

Li says Internet news has shifted that paradigm in several ways. Story placement on web pages tends to be overshadowed by the sheer number of choices for viewers to "click." Other traditional cues the media use to signal important stories aren't available on web pages, or consumers trolling for information they want simply ignore such devices.

Nonetheless, research shows that Internet readers still tend to focus on the same types of stories and information that media outlets tend to emphasize in their traditional formats. That phenomenon opens additional frontiers for research, Li says.

Another issue the researchers tackle involves the concept of "linking" Internet viewers to other sources of information. Early on, online news outlets tended to link readers to a wide range of information sources. Now, however, they more often link readers to their own archives, keeping the consumer's eyes on their site longer and adding more page views to the count. Such statistics can then become part of the formula for setting advertising rates for online newspapers.

"This is a new issue," Li says. "The question is whether linking is expanding or narrowing the information available."

Other chapters delve into topics such as how web page design affects the ease of information retrieval; the effect of Internet newspapers on print newspaper circulations; and the contribution of Internet news to democracy.

With many newspapers reporting declining circulation, will print newspapers survive? It's difficult to make predictions about media, Li says, but the Internet has changed the landscape of media competition and younger generations are already used to getting their information online.

Over time, he thinks, "the Internet will dominate. I seldom read a print newspaper unless I'm traveling, and I don't really miss it."

—by Tim Crosby, Media & Communication Resources