For my midterm project, I plan on providing an in-depth analysis of the New York Times website (www.nytimes.com). This particular digital text is of interest to me since online news sources appear to be significantly changing the structure of the mass-media news sources. I plan to examine this online news website in terms of how it offers a much more personalized and interactive experience than a printed newspaper. For example, I am intrigued by the prominent use of subject-specific blogs on the New York Times website that do not exist (or are of limited capacity) in the printed newspaper version. Beyond opening up an entire new realm of subject-specific news analysis, blogs allow the reader to interact with the author by responding to the original blog post.

Beyond the issues associated with the infusion of online blogs into mass-media, I am intrigued how the infusion of alternative online news sources has influenced the development of mass-media online news sources such as the New York Times. In particular, I am interested in how the structure and development of the New York Times website mirrors the overall decentralization of mass-media news content as individuals tend to gather their news from a wide variety of decentralized online news sources that tend to have a specialized focus on one particular subject area. In sum, given the popularity of issue-specific online news sites, I plan to examine how the New York Times (and other conventional mass-media news sources) have changed their presentation of news media to keep up with this fairly new online dynamic.