1What is online journalism? - Ayo Menulis FISIP UAJY

Design your web resource 185
As Matt Haig, a leading e-PR practitioner in the UK, puts it in
E-PR (2000), many businesses do not understand the ‘terms’ of
the Internet:
This is why so many businesses that sped headlong onto the
information superhighway are now left stranded in the lay-by,
alone and unvisited in the depths of cyberspace.
So start off with the journalist’s friend, that clean sheet of white
paper, and some basic terms of reference.
Consider and organize your potential content
‘As the Internet provides us all with the freedom to publish
information, it quietly burdens us with the responsibility to
organize that information.’ Rosenfeld and Morville (1998)
The next stage is to think carefully about your content, but in a
way that may not come naturally to you. Think not just of the
individual stories or the tone of your journalism, but how you will
arrange it into groups and what will be the structure between
those groups.
This approach may bother you, because it makes you feel more
like a librarian than a journalist. But you must get used to it
because the distinction is not valid in the online world. The web
environment can be hugely liberating for the user, but only if there
has been careful planning by the provider. It is an apparent
paradox, but without structure, there is no freedom. It will also
make your job much easier and more enjoyable in the long run.
The first thing to put on your sheet of paper is an outline of the
potential content for your site. This should not be item by item,
rather some broad headings, including features (e.g. daily news)
and functions (e.g. help page). If you want to feel important, you
can tell yourself you are compiling an outline content inventory.
At this stage, a list will suffice, but Rosenfeld and Morville
recommend that a hierarchical model, like a family tree, is another
useful starting point: