3,371
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posted: december 19, 1999
[This is the text of a paper presented at the Media in Transition
Conference at MIT on October 8, 1999.]
WRAL OnLine
(http://wral-tv.com)
received national recognition in its first year of operation
as one of the first 24-hour-a-day news sites launched by a television
station, and has continued to refine its contents and appearance
each year. This paper, part of a larger work in progress, presents
a brief history of WRAL OnLine and its parent company, including
a design-history of the Web site's home page. Based on observation
of the site and interviews with the its news producers, designers
and programmers, the larger project draws on two streams in
the mass communication literature: "gatekeeping" research and
sociological studies of newsworkers. No case is made for WRAL
being typical or representative of American television stations'
explorations of the Internet; instead it is presented here as
a case that shows media professionals actively exploring the
possibilities of a new medium where features of print newspapers,
broadcast news, and the interactive features of a new medium.
During the site's first
three and a half years, the staff refined the home page as a
presentation of information about both the day's news events
and the site's full range of contents, including interactive
features, online video, and reference links mentioned during
television news broadcasts. The evolving features of WRAL OnLine
suggest a blurring of technological and media-content boundaries,
illustrating phenomena discussed recently by J. David Bolter
and Richard Grusin under the title Remediation, as well
as the changes Roger Fidler suggests in his book, Mediamorphosis.
With its parent company's interests in digital broadcasting
and data communications, WRAL OnLine seems worth watching.
Each year since its
launch, WRAL-OnLine has made incremental changes in form and
content, as well as making alliances with other media organizations.
The first incarnation of the home page was a cartoon of a smiling
sun shining on a hillside of iconic buildings representing different
parts of the site; the "Happy Valley" of my title. This paper
suggests that the changes not only responded to the evolving
technological capabilities of Web browsers, but have clarified
the site's purpose and identity -- in relation to the station's
parent company, its other media properties, and the local community.
The designs and redesigns also illustrate the blurring boundaries
between news, entertainment, public service, commercial and
self-promotional functions of the media. Among WRAL OnLine's
features are a 24-hour-a-day approach to national and international
news, a complete archive of feature story Web pages based on
original WRAL-TV reporting since the site's inception; integration
of digital text, video, audio and databases in local reporting;
early steps in online commerce, and attempts to encourage audience
identification (or "virtual-community-building") through bulletin
boards, polls, and other interactive features.
WRAL: Corporate Context
WRAL-TV is owned by
Capitol Broadcasting Company, Inc., a diversified communications
company that began with a single Raleigh, N.C., radio station
in 1937. By 1998 Capitol Broadcasting included three television
channels and a wide range of other services, and had a reputation
as a technological innovator or "early adopter" through its
entries into FM radio, television, digital high definition television
(HDTV), and the Internet. Capitol Broadcasting's founders were
Alfred J. Fletcher, a Raleigh attorney, and his son Frank, an
attorney with the Federal Communications Commission. Their 250-watt
WRAL-AM went on the air in 1939 as the second commercial station
in the city. Fred Fletcher, another son of A.J. Fletcher, became
general manager in 1942 and continued as the company's president
into the 1970s. Jim Goodmon, a grandson of the founder, was
company president and CEO in the 1990s.
Several milestones
listed in the company history involve the company's adoption
of new communication technologies: starting FM broadcasts in
1946, launching its television operation in 1956, building its
2,000-foot transmitting tower in 1978 (the "tallest man-made
structure east of the Mississippi River"), and hiring professional
meteorologists for the newsroom staff in 1982 as the WRAL-TV
Weather Center. With the launch of WRAL OnLine in January 1996,
the company added the Internet to its media-technology résumé.
(WRAL, 1998)
An article by Goodmon,
posted on the company Web site, summarizes the WRAL's image
as a technological leader:
Channel 5 quickly
became a national leader in innovative news and community-oriented
programming. Today, Channel 5 CBS continues to lead the nation
in its innovative approach to communicating with its publics
with the addition of WRAL OnLine, a comprehensive release of
up-to-the-minute news, weather, and sports reports on the Internet
and World Wide Web. (Goodmon, 1996)
Goodmon is credited
by the firm with its expansion into satellite communications,
the Internet, and HDTV. Television Broadcast magazine
named WRAL 1996 Broadcaster of the Year for being the first
commercial television station in the U.S. to broadcast a high-definition
digital signal. Capitol Broadcasting's other subsidiaries include
Capitol Radio Networks, the Durham Bulls baseball team, the
Capitolnet Marketing Group, and Microspace Communications Corporation,
(satellite transmission of data, video and audio). The company
owned an Internet Service Provider (ISP) business, Interpath,
but sold it to the Carolina Light & Power Company in December,
1997, arguing that facilities-based telecommunications companies
were better suited to the ISP business, and citing a series
of start-ups, mergers or acquisitions by companies including
GTE, AT&T, BellSouth and WorldCom/MCI (Capitol Broadcasting,
1997). In addition to WRAL-TV, the CBS-affiliated channel 5,
Capitol Broadcasting operated several other television stations
in North Carolina, either as owner or under limited marketing
agreements (LMAs) with their owners: WRAZ Channel 50 in Durham
(Fox), WJZY Channel 46 in Charlotte (UPN), WFVT Channel 55 in
Charlotte (Warner Brothers), and WRAL-HDTV, Channel 32. The
parent company and other stations also established Web sites,
but without the 24-hour-a-day-news focus of WRAL OnLine. Until
1999, the WRAL OnLine home page included a link to WRAZ, but
the June, 1999, redesign did not.
WRAL OnLine
In January, 1996, WRAL
began delivering news at the Internet address http://www.wral-tv.com.
It was the first Raleigh-Durham television station on the Web,
establishing its presence before its national television network
(CBS) went online. The Web site's own history page summarizes
its features as follows:
WRAL-TV5 OnLine
features: highlights of WRAL's top news stories updated regularly;
weather forecasts updated several times a day; sports scores
and a "Play of the Day" video; a daily program schedule; "Buying
Power," "Health Team," "For The Children," and other special
features; shopping coupons and sponsor advertisements; information
about WRAL-TV5, its mission and its people; an updated list
of community events and volunteer opportunities; and, the opportunity
to correspond with the staff of WRAL-TV5. (WRAL, 1998.)
The original staff included
a technical director (computer systems administrator and programmer),
John Whitehead, who was hired a year before the launch of the
Web site, while a graphic designer and news producer were being
recruited from the television station's staff. WRAL OnLine's
news director, John Conway, additional news producers and a
second programmer were hired from outside the company to prepare
for the launch in January, 1996. His primary experience was
in daily newspaper journalism. Other staff members' professional
experience was a cross-section of print newspaper reporting
and editing, radio and television news and technical writing.
By the launch date the OnLine staff had created dozens of Web
pages using November and December WRAL-TV stories -- both as
a "shake-down" period for the production process and as the
beginning of WRAL OnLine's practice of maintaining searchable
archives of its daily stories.
After those shakedown
weeks, the television station broadcast a five-day series of
stories about the Web in February, including the formal announcement
of WRAL OnLine to its home audience. A story archived at WRAL
OnLine with the date Feb. 12, 1996, talks about the site's "first
24 hours of operation" being a success, suggesting the first
"official" day was Feb. 11. However, the organization marked
its one-year anniversary January 17, 1997. (Its online archives
include stories from November and December, 1995, which were
developed in preparation for regular daily operation.)
During the time period
of this study WRAL OnLine was housed in two offices on the first
and second floors of the main WRAL-TV building in Raleigh, N.C.
The upstairs office housed the Web server computers and the
work stations for the two programmers and the graphic designer.
The compact downstairs "newsroom" included four work stations,
television monitors, video and audio recording equipment, and
computers linked to both the station's internal computer system
and the Internet. The four desks accommodated the four full-time
and two to four part-time producers, who worked overlapping
shifts. (Usually no more than three staff members used the room
at a time.) The news producer and feature producer sat back-to-back
at one end of the room; the sports producer and news director
at the other. WRAL OnLine followed television news terminology,
using the title "producer" rather than "editor."
WRAL's television studios
and broadcast newsroom, with a staff of more than 75 reporters
and producers, were also on the first floor of the building,
down a twisting corridor from the OnLine offices. The two departments
shared computer printers in the connecting hallway, as well
as sharing use of a conference room a few steps from the OnLine
newsroom entrance. Administratively, Conway reported to the
station's promotions director, and WRAL OnLine staff members
sometimes contributed to projects for other parts of the organization,
such as graphic designs for use on-air or in promotional publications.
The Web site's original
file and database structures were used by WRAL OnLine for at
least three years, although the original technical director
who developed them left the company shortly after the site's
first full year of operation. Continuity was provided by Jason
Priebe, the organization's second programmer, who joined the
company a few months after the launch of the site and was promoted
to technical director the next year. Both Whitehead and Priebe
developed programs to automate or facilitate various kinds of
text conversion and page-construction. An additional programmer
was hired in May 1997, but left after a little over a year.
The original visual design elements for the Web pages were created
by WRAL-TV staff designers in consultation with the television
station's management. The WRAL logo, weather maps and other
graphics were patterned after those presented to the station's
television station. Categories for the news presentation were
modeled on the categories of station news and Associated Press
wire service news categories:
On the occasion of its
first anniversary, WRAL OnLine described itself as "one of the
first TV stations with a real commitment to providing 24-hour
news and information," and summarized several "strengths of
television" that it intended to bring to the Web: "immediacy,
personality, local news, informational graphics, entertainment,
community service, live audio, and most recently, live video."
In that first year, the station's home page had been visited
more than 1 million times, the staff had written 1,685 local
news and sports stories and 942 local features, and the online
archives totalled 8,300 Web pages. (WRAL, 1997)
WRAL5 OnLine has presented
a new or mostly-new face to its viewers once a year, with some
design changes between these major "new looks." The original
home page (1996-97) was a full-screen cartoon of a landscape
that the staff came to refer to as "Happy Valley." A dozen objects
located in the scene were "clickable" links to the main sections
of the WRAL Web site. A cartoon sun with a toothy smile rose
in the back of the scene, under an airplane towing a "Weather
Center" banner. A football stadium was labelled "Sports"; a
van with a satellite antenna on the roof was marked "News";
a television set's screen held the words "What's On?" Other
features were: a shopping mall for online shopping, a drive-in
theater ("Features"), a street sign marked "Interpath" (the
Capitol Broadcasting Internet access company), a statue marked
"Town Square," a billboard labelled "Neat Stuff" and two antenna-topped
buildings in the background, marked WRAL and WRAZ (WRAL's sister
station). For visitors whose browsers were incapable of displaying
graphical navigation maps, the page included a text menu at
the bottom- below the area of the screen devoted to the Happy
Valley map.
1997 Design
The 1997 home page
was reminiscent of contemporary newspaper front-page designs,
such as USA Today. That is, it divided the screen (or
page) into distinct rectangular areas beneath a nameplate or
title-bar area at the top. It presented a narrow menu at the
left, stories at the right, and one- or two-line text "teases"
at the bottom. The blue title bar had a "WRAL5 OnLine" logo
in the center, with clickable links on the words "contents,"
"search," "help" and "feedback" incorporated in its bottom edge.
On either side of the logo, the blue bar carried slogans, "News
and information 24 hours a day" and "Coverage you can count
on." (The latter being a slogan used in the broadcast station's
own promotions.)
While this design (Figure
2) departed from the full-screen graphical image, a smaller
version of the earlier Happy Valley map now appeared as a square
(c. 1.5- inch) image near the top of the page. This image was
not only a reminder, but a clickable link to the original full-screen
version of the home page for users who were accustomed to that
means of navigating the site. On the new home page, the small
Happy Valley image topped a column on the left side of the screen,
including a text-only menu listing 10 major sections of the
site (News, Weather, Sports, Features, etc.), and three small
rectangular graphics linked to special features. (Example: "A
new way to track the hurricanes!" promoting the "ncstormtrack.com"
site established and promoted jointly by WRAL's meteorology
staff and and the News & Observer.)
To the right of this
menu, the main body of the page (roughly three-fourths of its
width) was divided into six display spaces, including one for
an advertising banner. There were three horizontal display spaces
atop three smaller vertical display spaces; the first and third
horizontal spaces each included a short section label ("Top
Story," "Triangle and N.C."), a longer story headline in one
or two lines, a photograph (or other image, such as a sports
team logo) and the first sentence or two of the story. Clicking
on the story headline transported the viewer to the full text
of that story. The space between the "Top Story" and the second
story was used for an advertisement. On a small computer screen,
only the top story and the advertisement would be visible without
scrolling the screen.
Lower on the screen,
the three vertical spaces each held a short section label ("Sports,"
"Health Team" or another section of the site), an image, and
the first sentence or two of a story. No headlines were used,
but the section labels were linked to the full text of the story.
The bottom of the page carried four one-sentence "teases" to
contents of the site other than routine news stories, such as
feature sections), opinion polls, or general promotion of various
sections of the site. (Examples: "New in Features: Lynn Hoggard's
Recipes Remakes," "Attention baseball fans: Check out our improved
scores page.") News section pages followed a similar design,
with a similar title bar, menu on the left side of the screen,
and photos with story headlines and summaries, as well as an
advertisement between the first and second stories.
1998 Design
The January 1998 redesign
added reminders that WRAL OnLine is the Web site of a television
station. Photographs, whether WRAL-TV images or wire photos
from Reuters and AP, were reformatted from their original rectangular
shapes to look like television screens. (A program was written
to frame the images in a border shaped like a picture tube,
with rounded corners and a background shadow to add contour.)
Instead of 1997's two-column layout, the 1998 design divided
the screen vertically into three columns underneath a combined
title bar and navigational menu. At first the three columns
were only suggested by blank space, but later in the year narrow
dividing lines were added.
The new title bar appeared
at the top of all section pages, which meant that a visitor
could use the title bar's navigation menu to go to any of the
major pages in the site without having to scroll down the screen,
which had been the case with the 1997 version's left-column
menu. There were few changes in content categories from the
1996 or 1997 versions of the site, primarily a change in navigation
and aesthetics and creation of more prominent spaces for both
on-site promotions and off-site advertising. Most section pages
also used a three-column design somewhat similar to the home
page. The feature section continued to use a large graphic to
present its diverse sub-sections until late 1998, when it shifted
to a modified version of the three-column layout.
Features of the 1998
design were adjusted gradually during the year, including revisions
of the scrolling index menu and relocation of a Java-driven
headline ticker to a separate page. While the developers were
excited about Java, it slowed delivery of the page on some systems
enough to raise concern. They moved it to a separate version
of the home page, which users with more robust systems can bookmark.
1999 Design
The main redesign for
1999 was completed in the spring, replacing the blue title bars
throughout the site with a silver version that added five items
to the main menu, which now had three full rows of links. The
new items provided separate home page links to each of the "feature"
areas of the site, which previously had required the user to
navigate through one or two intermediary pages to reach topics
that represent major segments of the television station's daily
newscasts: health, consumer, food, family and leisure features.
These feature stories had represented major efforts on the part
of both the WRAL OnLine staff and the television reporters since
the start of the site. They included pages the online designer
and producers considered to be some of their most creative work,
as well as sections mirroring television segments with a loyal
following. In addition, the main "local news" section of the
site was promoted to the top left position on the home page
menu, giving additional emphasis to Web pages featuring stories
developed by WRAL-TV's own reporters and producers, rather than
syndicated or wire-service material.
The top-right position
on the new main menu was now "WebLinks," the hyperlink to a
page featuring clickable links to sites mentioned during one
or more of WRAL-TV's daily newscasts. The presence of this link
was mentioned frequently by the television announcers as a source
of examples or additional information. The "WRALMart" electronic-commerce
link had occupied this position on the menu in the previous
design, but the 1999 home page reflected the site's commercial
enterprises in other ways: A new link name, "iShop," as well
as tease links to particular commercial and station-promotion
sections of the site. Above the tease links, the page's right
column featured a daily "hot button" poll that was mentioned
on many of the broadcast news programs. In addition to the poll,
the right column teases highlighted in-depth coverage, such
as features on the moving of the Cape Hatteras lighthouse, the
U.S. Open and, later in the year, Hurricane Floyd and hurricane
flood relief efforts. WRAL OnLine enlisted its readers in "covering"
the hurricane crisis, encouraging them to post reports of flooding
in their neighborhoods as part of an ongoing bulletin board
discussion.
The 1999 design continued
to highlight the site's use of Web-only technologies, expanding
into remote Web cams and streaming video. It maintained the
site's original commitment to preserving archives of its locally-produced
stories and features, and added an increasing level of reference
by the on-air announcers to the informational, community service
and electronic-commerce features of the Web site. The hot-button
polls may be statistically meaningless, but they and the site's
discussion forums do provide more interactivity than conventional
television. In addition, WRAL-OnLine has formed partnerships
with an equally Web-savvy local newspaper, the News &
Observer, to provide local arts and events listings, a community-service
Web-hosting area, http://ncneighbors.com, as well as a hurricane-emergency
site, http://ncstormtrack.com.
WRAL-TV's local and
regional roots, combined with the familiarity of local news
"branding," WRAL-OnLine's explorations of around-the-clock news,
and its experiments with online commercial transactions all
position the company well for its new explorations of digital
television broadcasting.
Feature comparison,
WRAL home page, 1995-1999
|
Happy
Valley 96 |
Blue Bar
97 |
Blue menu
98 |
Silver
99 |
General
description |
Graphic image
of community, services; text links below.
|
Station slogans
for branding; story summaries for news identity
Much
local content linked from "Features" heading.
|
More efficient
compact menu; tv shapes; more site info, promotion
& marketing; less news content |
More direct
linkage to feature categories (schools, health, etc.) |
Total number
of links |
13 |
28 |
40+ (plus
scrolling index) |
40+ |
Main menu |
13-Item graphic;
text below |
4 horizontal;
11 vertical |
17 |
21 links |
Head/Sum |
none |
5/5 |
6 |
6 |
Teases &
promotion |
|
3 or 4 left
col graphic; 4 page bottom text |
Full right
column |
Full right
column |
Graphic elements |
Page is all
one image, with 14 elements |
News photos
with stories |
"TV" photos,
Gif-anim teases |
|
TV relationship
identifiers |
Station images,
antenna, helicopter |
Slogans from
the TV station in title bar, text teases; video and
audio link markers |
TV-shape
photos, slogan; remote control; graphic teases ; quick
weather forecast |
More prominent
link to broadcasters' bookmarks |
Usability |
Icon-oriented
graphic to welcome new users |
Visible menus
and visible news content to guide repeat visitors |
Less scrolling;
consistent navigation menu |
Fewer layers
to reach feature content |
Interactive
features, animation |
Town square
link to discussion forum page.; e-mail link (mailbox) |
"Give us
your opinion" text tease. |
Hot button
poll; java news ticker (moved because of crash problems) |
Daily poll;
prominent search; java, e-mail and palm versions |
|
Notes
This paper is part
of a dissertation being prepared as part of the requirements
for a doctorate from the School of Journalism and Mass Communication,
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.