1What is online journalism? - Ayo Menulis FISIP UAJY

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information, for example someone’s name, to identify that
person’s picture from the other half a dozen names in the story.
But you will usually want to add other details explaining the
person’s relevance to the story. Remember, people may read a
caption before the main text of a story.
Fitting two separate pieces of information into one line is not
easy. One common technique among caption writers is to use a
colon to establish a link between the two pieces of information.
This can work in either order. So a story about the craze of
Digimon toys sweeping the UK might have a picture of one of
them with the caption: ‘Digimon: sweeping the nation’ or ‘Latest
craze: Digimon toys’.
Summaries are also used extensively on online news sites,
outlining the story and hopefully inviting the reader to click
through to the detailed coverage. Again these need to be written
carefully. They should not necessarily be the first two paragraphs
of the story and they certainly should not repeat what is in the
headline as this will accompany them on the page. The BBC limit
their summaries to one sentence in the present tense.
There is one area where online provides a new challenge for the
journalist as text editor and that is in the labelling of links. How
often have you seen a site inviting you to link to other pages or
sites without giving you any clear idea of what to expect or why
you should go there? Internal links (linking you to other pages
within your own site) are often the most challenging. The external
link can be summarized by using the name of the organization that
you are linking to. But internal links might take you to pages
containing quite complex content, such as ‘Related Stories’. You
must think carefully how to summarize these in a way that makes
sense to your user. A good check on this is to periodically show
your links to someone unfamiliar with the previous coverage and
see if they can understand them.
So, structure and writing, ideas and language – essential
determinants of how you select and present your information.
It’s not hard to see how the simplicity of classic news writing
will benefit online journalism. But what is the appropriate story
construction for this medium? That’s what we turn our attention
to next.