1What is online journalism? - Ayo Menulis FISIP UAJY

4 Writing
“The full stop is a great help to sanity.”
Harold Evans, Essential English for Journalists 1
Words are the worker bees of the Web and the Internet, used for
basic text, headlines, captions, summaries, raw data, archived
documents and millions of messages in newsgroups, listservs and
e-mail. It is also the written word that makes the web itself work,
through the linking of pages with Hyper Text Markup Language or
HTML.
And yet, as we will see, the computer screen is not the easiest
place to read large amounts of text. In particular, it has almost
become a platitude that ‘users won’t scroll’ down the screen to
read a long story.
Not everyone agrees. Brock N. Meakes is Chief Washington
Correspondent for MSNBC. He believes ‘If you’re a good writer
and you have a good story to tell, people will read all the way
through to the end, whether it’s on the Web, in a newspaper or
written on the ceiling of your hotel room. They will scroll if you
write well.’ 2
1 Evans (2000), p 19.
2 Interview with author, June 2000.