The Future of News: Presentation, Storytelling and Use of Web Technologies on Traditional and Startup News Websites

This explorative thesis research was conducted because there has been little to no literature researching the specific topic of presentation, storytelling and use of web technologies on online news websites in the last decade. At the same time a recent wave of new (startup) natively digital news websites show interesting differences with the online efforts of traditional news organizations and are able to somehow realize growth in a declining industry. In this thesis the topic is researched by performing both a content analysis of three traditional and startup news websites, and conducting interviews at traditional newspaper organization De Volkskrant and its parent organization de Persgroep. This thesis research proves that it is indeed useful for researchers to reconsider researching the topic, by finding extensive differences in the presentation, storytelling and use of web technologies between those two types of organizations and exploring several possible strategies, motivations and circumstances that could explain these differences.