# From Rigidity to Exuberance: Evolution of News on Online Newspaper Homepages
## 5 Discussion and Conclusions  
In the past 25 years, design of online media has evolved from simple complementary editions of the analogical media that housed a mere transfer of content, to complex online media distributed in multi-format mode by an adaptable web design. In terms of design, growing technicification of the process of displaying news pieces, and the multi-format nature of their distribution, have sacrificed part of the visual singularity that characterized the press, and left media design in the hands of staff who often lack journalistic or design training [44], while journalists work with content management systems (CMS) [45]. However, we must not forget that the design of journalist news has always entailed different disciplines working together for a purpose [46; 47]. While traditional press design bore front pages that were enormously synthetic and highly hierarchized, governed by very stable conventions, today's online media are governed by generic web design patterns, such as usability [48], information architecture [49], interaction [50; 51; 52], and user experience [5]. Despite this, news sites can be considered as a specific type of website that shows some peculiarities. The use of the web has provided the media with specific characteristics such as rapid content updating, multimedia or interaction, which have transformed, over the years, the way in which information is presented. Thus, online newspaper homepages have evolved from a rigid model to a dynamic one, with its own visual identity. In this regard, the most distinctive element of online media design is the presence of highly vertical and saturated index-type front pages, which continue to operate as display cases for an exuberant supply of news pieces [16], which forces constant displacement in order to view the profuse supply of content [53]. In terms of content, front pages have evolved from an almost exclusively text model to another model characterized by balance between text and images, which indicates a growing visual trend [15] and underlines the fundamental role that images play in online journalism, ahead of other multimedia formats [54]. Thus, the convergence of content that pivoted around the use of text as a nuclear element that characterizes news media webpages has declined [31]. Moreover, the design of online media has been conditioned by changes in audiences' reading habits, going from customary consumers of one sole format to broadening their customary news diet to a greater number of media outlets, which has fostered an exponential increase in sporadic and superficial consumption of news [55]. This has reconfigured front pages, which have gone from being selective display cases to meta front pages with sections and indices for news pieces. Additionally, front pages have lost their status as the exclusive access point to news pieces since online media now conjointly draw in over half of their readers through search engines and social media. For this reason, SEO techniques rival traditional criteria for relevance and hierarchization in the most relevant sources to access the media [56]. In visual terms, we can state that while journalistic design was focused on the design of newspapers, in online media, the design of journalistic information takes care of information as a new unit of value [57]. In the immediate future, the beginning of a new visual transformation of online media will be influenced by factors such as the new forms of non-linear storytelling, sharing and authoring [58] or the use of augmented reality [59], while the development of subscription models, with more loyal audiences that directly access the media, may be the main future challenge in this sphere [60].