ABSTRACT
An examination of readers of electronic news sites is a vitally important part of establishing the credentials of this new news medium. Electronic newspapers have been a rapidly expanding phenomenon the world over. In the United States, for instance, there were more than 3,400 U.S. online newspapers and 2,000 non-U.S. online newspapers being produced by the end of the 20th century. As recently as 1990, there were only seven newspapers that were accessed mostly via bulletin board systems. In the Arab world, daily electronic newspapers grew from a zero point in 1994 to 65 publications on the Internet in the year 2000 (Alshehri, 2000).
