1What is online journalism? - Ayo Menulis FISIP UAJY

138 Journalism Online
Archive
hold your breath. Compared to re-purposing existing broadcast
output (complete with short reports and soundbites), such use
of audio is a minority market.
At first glance, archives are not a truly distinctive element of
online. They have been a feature of newspapers for centuries.
Many are now stored in digital form on CD-Rom and so are also
searchable.
Yet scratch the surface and you start to see significant differences
between the potential of the newspaper archive and a web-based
resource. First, the web-based archive can be much richer with
audio, video, pictures, charts and data to complement the text.
Second, the scale of web-based archived material can be impressive.
By mid–2000, BBC News Online alone estimated it had up to
700,000 stories in its archive with hundreds being added daily.
However, it is the third difference, namely the amount of
information being accessed, which is the real eye-opener. In the
case of the BBC, it is around half the total archive each week. That
is up to 350,000 stories called up and read each week – about
70,000 a day. What does this tell us? Well, among other things it
demonstrates that a web-based archive is a living entity, an
essential element of a site’s content provision. It can complement
current content and enhance interactivity and personalization of
information. It also shows that a site can satisfy a broader range of
user demands if it organizes its archive effectively.
Organization is the key. There is already a daily tension
between what Rosenfeld and Morville 10 refer to as the ‘top-down’
information architecture, that is the ‘basic top-level structure and
navigation for organizing large bodies of content, such as entire
sites’, and the ‘bottom-up’ perspective of information architecture.
This is ‘how you organize content at a much finer level of
granularity, not whole sites, but at the level of individual
documents or going further, at the level of content “chunks”’.
What happens when ‘top-down’ and ‘bottom-up’ meet in the
middle? When you define content areas for sites, you are working
10 HTTP://web.oreilly.com/news/infoarch_0100.html