What is Divergent Media

The focus of computer mediated communication research has been lying on the dialogical aspect of Internet communication while the presentation and consumption of online news have been understudied. In this chapter, we make a strong plead to not studying the Internet as one, homogeneous medium, but instead as a meta-medium that carries various divergent news media with specific formal and structural features. These features are important as they influence the information-processing that encompasses the computer mediated news consumption and are, as we suggest, essential when doing communication research. Both the results of a content analysis of the online coverage of the 2006 elections in Flanders, Belgium, and the literature overview of the black-box of information-processing of online news make strong appeal to computer mediated communication scholars to invest in studies towards the form and structure of online news media in order to better understand the total process of computer mediated news communication.