1What is online journalism? - Ayo Menulis FISIP UAJY

144 Journalism Online
Interactivity
the BBC journalist should be ‘editorial integrity’ and ‘taste and
decency’. The guidelines stress the importance of checking the
content of sites before linking to them. However, the challenge of
controlling the web re-emerges with the edict that all linked sites
should continue to be checked after the link has been
established.
Despite all these safeguards, the BBC still issues its standard
disclaimer on its site, distancing itself from the content of any
linked site and absolving itself of any responsibility for what may
be found there. The BBC is totally committed to online, but it’s
used to having total control over its own output. Auntie is still a
little nervous about online, in case the new family pet turns out to
be a rabid dog.
This is the final distinctive feature of online and arguably its most
powerful.
People sometimes talk about interactivity with a capital ‘I’, as if
it were some defined entity. But interactivity is a process rather
than a product. Like most processes, it can operate at different
levels. An understanding of those levels will help you to build
interactivity into a story or site. If you apply an inappropriate level
of interactivity to your story/site, you may suffer rejection; and in
the case of the empty message board on a site, that can be very
public.
To understand the different levels of interactivity, it is useful to
think of the different models of mass communication.
The one-way model
This is the traditional model used by newspapers and broadcasters.
They make decisions on what is newsworthy and what is
not and then send the resulting stories to their readers who read/
watch/listen or do not bother, depending on the choices the
journalist has made. It is predominantly a one-way model –
journalist to user. Nothing much comes back.