Online news sources are of major relevance to news recipients and, thus, to communication scholars. The variety of online news channels, however, challenges empirical approaches in terms of sampling. As automatic retrieval of articles is possible through multiple channels (i.e., API’s, RSS, scraping) we ask for the various channels’ differences in both, article completeness and fetching delay. We captured articles from two major German online newspapers over four weeks via the media outlets’ Twitter channels (API), their official RSS feeds, and through scraping of their websites (N = 10271). Results show that article completeness depends largely on the chosen channel whereas fetching delay does not reveal major differences. Implications for future research are discussed.

Keyling, T. & Haim, M. (10/2014). Zur Stichprobenqualität von Online-Nachrichtenmedien. [On the quality of sampling in online media.] Presented at the 16th Annual Conference of the Methods Division of the DGPuK, Munich. (content_copy)