The Use of Multimedia in Newspapers: A Study on the Websites of Emirati Newspapers

Abstract

The competition faced by journalistic websites has imposed the necessity of taking advantage of the capabilities offered by the Internet so that it can provide more distinguished journalistic services, to attract the largest number of users, as the strength of a newspaper website is measured by the number of people browsing it on the one hand, and the period that the user spends on it, The research problem is to monitor the use of multimedia websites of Emirati newspapers (Al-Ittihad, Al-Bayan, Al-Khaleej).The study aimed to determine the extent to which Emirati newspapers use multimedia in their websites during the study period (January - March 2023), and the key elements they used to present and publish their news to the audience. This study used the descriptive analytical approach for 14 issues of each newspaper on their websites, and several results were obtained, the most important of which are: The newspapers sampled for the study relied mainly on pictures, using them in 1272 out of 1632 media, with a percentage of 77.9%. The use of audio clips ranked second, with 218 clips out of 1632 media and a percentage of 13.3%. Al-Khaleej newspaper ranked first with 212 clips out of the total clips used, with a large margin of 97.25%, as it distinguished itself by using audio clips in every news story and alongside every video as an additional feature. Al-Ittihad newspaper only used 6 audio blogs, with a percentage of 2.75% out of 218 clips, followed by videos in third place with 100 videos out of the total media used, with a percentage of 6.1%. Infographics came in fourth place in terms of using multimedia, with 42 infographics, accounting for 2.7% of the total multimedia used.