1What is online journalism? - Ayo Menulis FISIP UAJY

148 Journalism Online
Journalists may feel ‘out of the loop’, but they are not. As we saw
in Chapter 3, newsgroups and message boards are a useful way of
understanding users’ needs, interests and pre-occupations. They
can provide story ideas and contacts. Journalists are still engaged
in the process but they have become users as well as providers.
This is an opportunity, not a threat.
So, users can be providers, but can they be journalists? Where
does self-indulgent sounding-off end and a new form of journalism
begin? Are there any quality benchmarks and, if so, how can they
operate?
Steve Yelvington believes such a model can be self-correcting:
Undoubtedly some bad work is going to be done by
‘untrained’ journalists. But bad work is done every day by
trained journalists too. We rely on the marketplace to correct
that. There is a marketplace for opinion and thought and that
is what I see operating on the Internet.
Yelvington cites Slashdot as an example of site users selfmoderating
site content. Users will post corrections to previous
contributions and grade each other’s submissions. If you end up
with a score of zero, and users have set their filter at two and
above, they may never even see your contribution.
When the environment is open like that, it does tend to even
out. If you look at the medium as just an extension of the
classical open marketplace of ideas, I think it makes sense. If
you look at the medium as an individual product, as the print
world would tend to, then I can see that this seems like a
frightening loss of control. But you never really had that
control to begin with. You just thought you did.
Such interaction, and the other distinctive features of online, will
add yet more colours to the journalist’s palette when we turn our
attention to the big picture – site design. However, first, because
hypertext lies at the heart of the Web and because this book is all
about removing unnecessary mystique, we will look at the
wonderful world of HTML.