1What is online journalism? - Ayo Menulis FISIP UAJY

130 Journalism Online
perspective. Avoid cute, clever or cryptic headings, as well as
headings that reflect only the author’s perspective. Remember
– when readers are scanning one of your pages, all they
will really ‘see’ at first will be the page title and headings.
Making story chunks stand alone and scannable are two of the
fundamentals of web writing. Yet is there room within this ‘new’
medium for more innovative approaches?
It is several years since Carole Rich 8 published her study into
news writing for the web. In it, she acknowledged the value of the
pyramid structure but also suggested experimentation:
If writers are trying to entice reading, other styles must be
explored. Experiments with writing on the Web involve many
fiction sites, and fiction is not written in an inverted pyramid
style. The Web offers a chance to be as eclectic in writing styles
as it is in its reading population. One size does not fit all!
Janet Murray (1997), author of Hamlet on the Holodeck, talked of
using segmentation to deliver an interlocking plot from different
points of view. Could such an approach be used in news? In essence,
it already is. Most news stories revolve around people’s different
perceptions, but how these perceptions are presented is another
matter. Overtly separating stories into chunks on the basis of
perspective rather than, say, subject heading is still an underdeveloped
technique in online news writing and story
construction.
The segmented approach of online should also lend itself to
using different writing styles within one story. Yet how often does
this happen? Newspaper journalists often cover stories which are
‘hard’ news but with a strong level of ‘human interest’. Unless doing
a special, they are usually expected to encapsulate all elements
within one story and, therefore, one style. Changing writing style
from straight news to narrative, for example, within a single
newspaper story is not recommended practice.
Covering the same story for the Web, you will chunk and then
write. You can use the hard news style for your latest factual
8 Published in 1998.(www.members.aol.com/crich13/poynter1.html)