News presentation in the context of visual identity: A case study of newspapers and news websites in Turkiye's national press

As a traditional printed publication, newspapers are primarily a visual product that appeals to the sense of sight through their design. Visual design elements such as photography, typography, color, and text combine to form the newspaper's identity. With the transformation of developing internet technologies into a form of mass communication, newspapers, which traditionally continue their publishing life, have expanded into the internet environment, creating another medium. A visual identity is created by using visual elements in this emerging medium, internet news sites, just like in newspapers. In both media, visual elements serve specific purposes. The most important of these purposes is that visual elements combine to create a visual identity. Visual identity is a combination of visual elements that represent and define a brand, including its visual identity, logo, color palette, typography, images, and other design elements. The visual elements that represent the brand's visual identity should be integrated consistently across all communication channels. Given that these mediums are related, they are expected to have similar elements regarding the visual authenticity of visual elements. In this context, this study aims to understand whether the visual identities of newspapers, which are among the traditional media channels in the national press of Turkiye, are maintained in online news sites, which serve as the digital face of these newspapers. The obtained data were analyzed thematically in the context of the four basic visual elements (text, photography, color, and typography) that form visual identity, and these two mediums were compared. The findings of the study reveal that newspapers in the Turkish national press do not reflect the visual identity they carry in their internet news sites, and the importance of the news is disregarded in internet news sites. It is important to note that the relationship between the visual elements in Turkish national newspapers is not meaningful. Because of this relationship between visual elements, newspapers in the Turkish national press are insufficient in expressing their visual identity. It has also been determined that an integrated internet web news site has become impossible due to the intensive use of news in Turkish national press newspapers, mainly because of the showcase-type page layout.