This article is a study of visual, verbal and visual-verbal communication on the home
pages of three English-language online newspapers from different national cultures.
Important similarities in the visual-verbal structure of news stories and home pages
between the three newspapers are identified. Each newspaper demonstrates a similar
tendency towards atomization of news texts with which readers interact over short
time scales, and a tendency towards greater consistency in the visual-verbal design
of news across longer timescales. A genre-specific visual grammar for online
newspaper home pages is emerging in response to the demands of the new medium and
historical and social trends in news reporting.
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