Bridging the second digital divide: Readability of news Web sites.

摘要

This study addresses the need to study the second digital divide as represented in disparities in access to information technology with respect to readability level. Accordingly, this study examines differences in readability level between print news sources and Internet news sources. To accomplish the research task, this thesis used a purposive sample technique to collect and analyze articles from the eight most popular news sources, four from the Internet and four from newspapers. The findings show that the Internet news sources have a significantly higher readability score than the print news sources. The conclusions suggest that educators become aware of the reading difficulty of Internet sources and that Internet content creators produce material that matches the reading level of a larger population. The study also recommends additional study to investigate factors that hinder members of the population from accessing information technology.