1What is online journalism? - Ayo Menulis FISIP UAJY

132 Journalism Online
The core journalistic skills of spotting, sourcing and developing
a story are still essential, but the methods of constructing a story,
say for television, can be very different. The factors that create
this difference are rooted within the medium itself and so impinge
on the whole journalistic process. For example, the television
journalist will look for pictures from the outset to construct them
into a sequence that will tell the story. Only then will he or she
turn to words, writing a script to support and enhance the
pictures.
As the medium determines the process of story construction,
it also shapes the final product. Television demands the primacy
of pictures and has a linear process of dissemination. Viewers of
a news story are fed a single stream of content which they
cannot re-order or select from (this will change with the onset
of interactive television, but this linearity has dominated the
process of television journalism since its inception and is still
the norm today).
Put those together and you present the television journalist with
an interesting challenge, namely how to get an audience and keep
it. Television news asks a lot of viewers – to be passive recipients,
physically committed (sitting, watching and listening) and more
emotionally and intellectually engaged in a story on local
government than the football, film or game show on the other
channels.
Television journalists adopt a low-risk strategy to cope with this
problem. Keep it short. Don’t give the audience time to get bored.
Tell the story, no matter how complex, in a maximum of two
minutes. So, again, the medium has fundamental consequences
for story construction. For example, in this case, no interview
extract can be longer than ten seconds. It is also the reason why
good television journalism is so difficult to do and such a
comparatively rare commodity.
Do the same rules apply to online? How much does interactivity,
and the power it gives to the user, affect the process of online
journalism. What impact do the other distinctive elements of
digital storytelling have on the end product? And how do you
harness them effectively to make them work for both the content
provider and user?