1What is online journalism? - Ayo Menulis FISIP UAJY

140 Journalism Online
on a large canvas – broad brush rather than pointillist. How does
or can this accommodate the fine detail of dividing individual
stories into chunks – these ‘atoms’ of information.
A breaking story may be divided up into various chunks, put
under a generic heading of ‘Europe’ or closer to home, for
example, ‘Wales’. This is manageable, even helpful, when you are
looking at the story as a whole on the day it breaks.
The issue comes into sharper focus when you archive such a
story. Do users go to a site archive for the same reason they visit
the breaking news section? Or are they more interested in vertical
searching, the drilling down, rather than the horizontal? If so, you
have a different user group with different needs. To cater for
these needs you will, of course, offer a search function. However,
current site searches are not always a satisfactory way of finding
material. This is because:
they are not always easy to find;
they do not always offer advanced searches;
if their advanced searches offer search by content category,
these usually simply replicate the categories of the site (e.g.
‘world’ or ‘uk’); and
some people prefer to browse directories.
Rosenfeld and Morville advocate a combination of conceptual
tools (e.g. manual indexing) and technology (e.g. search engines):
‘The big prize goes to those who figure out the best hybrid
solution that combines the most appropriate set of technological
and conceptual tools to help your particular community of users
find their way to your unique content.’
One answer lies in better meta data within each story – tags in
each chunk relating to archive directory headings that cut across
the original top-down categories. Your user could then connect to
range of information chunks within each field, not just a horizontal
slice of previous pages relating to the subject-matter. You could
offer that finer ‘granularity’ of information.
The more advanced site archives offer this flexibility, but many
are overlooking one of their most precious assets and sources of
unique content, namely their archives.