Are traditional media and online media different? Let's do a research!

Here's the cite:

Michael A. Cacciatore,  Ashley A. Anderson,  Doo-Hun Choi,  Dominique Brossard,  Dietram A. Scheufele,  Xuan Liang, Peter J. Ladwig,  Michael Xenos,  and Anthony Dudo
Coverage of emerging technologies: A comparison between print and online media
New Media & Society September 2012 14: 1039-1059, first published on March 21, 2012 doi:10.1177/1461444812439061

And a link to it.

First of all, how do I get on the ninth author train? Seems like a good way to get around. How many ninth authorships does it take to equal one solo authorship? And what do you do as ninth author? Write the subheads and table captions?

Second of all, a summary of findings:

• U.S. print media cover less nanotechnology news than blogs in general do (using google blogs search)
• Blogs in general use more varied themes in their coverage of nanotechnology (think frames: environment and nanotechnology, health and nanotechnology, etc.) than U.S. print media do.

Third, stuff like this should be caught by a reviewer:

This suggests that print news media and Google News share similar issue-attention cycles for emerging technologies, perhaps because Google News aggregates online news articles from print news outlets.

Perhaps? More like, precisely because of that fact. Sometimes I wonder if people really treat Google News like the aggregator it is.

Also:

These contradictory findings imply that it is not the type of media – either the internet or traditional news media – that matters for the establishment of a public sphere. 

Then why is that what you're studying?

So my main problem is how the research is framed. They have set up the main question of the paper to be whether there's a difference between print and online media sources. And the answer to that is a resounding, "DUH." This would only be significant if there were NO difference between the two, I think. I mean, you can look at them and see that they're different, you don't need research to tell you precisely how. In my opinion it would be more useful in the long run to study what attributes of each medium contribute to the differences in the way they cover things and in their subject selection, or to study actual effects on readers (knowledge, importance and range of topics, etc.) rather than projecting these effects in the discussion section.