1What is online journalism? - Ayo Menulis FISIP UAJY

Online story construction 123
Rules 3 and 4 – deconstruct, reconstruct and storyboard.
Divide your story into component pieces, look for similarities or
trends in those pieces, group your pieces into logical categories,
reconstruct your story, using storyboards, to group the
pieces under those categories and build cross-links. Each story
will have one section which is the ‘linear kernel’ – the essence
of the story – plus other sections which will provide additional
information, background and explanations.
Rule 5 – do not use technology out of context. Anything that
does not further a story is visual noise. 4
The traditional pyramid structure, as we have seen, positions the
introduction, development and background of a story within one
solid block of interlocking sections. This method produces
lengthy single pieces, carefully developed and structured. This
can be an advantage in newspapers, helping to orientate readers
through the story. However, such a treatment presented problems
for online from the outset.
Gentry’s approach, adopted at least in theory by many in the
online content community, was to break up the monolith by
dismantling the pyramid.
The reason for this, as explained in Chapter 4, is that it takes
longer and is more tiring (requiring scrolling) to read from a
screen than a printed page. Of course, larger single stories also
mean bigger files which take longer to download. Separating your
story into different sections you will ameliorate these problems. If
you are not careful, however, you might create a few others, for
example causing the reader confusion when navigating your
sections. However, it should certainly make it easier for readers to
download and to scan rather than scroll.
This improvement in usability might be reason enough
to follow the Gentry model. But there are two other factors,
more fundamental to your journalism, that help to explain why
the ‘deconstruction–reconstruction’ approach has been central
to the development of online journalism during the formative
years.
4 www.naa.org