1What is online journalism? - Ayo Menulis FISIP UAJY

The core journalism 43
companies, charities, pressure groups, etc., pumping out their
particular view on the world.
It is a valuable resource, but should be handled with care.
Journalists in the ‘old’ media are always told to double-source
their information – to check and cross-check. Those rules do not
change because the information is offered online. If anything, they
should be imposed even more stringently because it is more
difficult to establish the provenance of material on the Internet.
Identify and find – what a journalist should and should not do
Start with good material
Listen carefully in any newsroom and you may detect the
unedifying sound of dead horses being flogged. Research and
reporting can be a time-consuming and energy-sapping business.
Why do journalists waste these scarce resources on material of
little promise, for example stories that:
have little interest to their readership;
have been told before; or
show little development potential?
Of course, to avoid such material you need to know what your
readers know and like. Aspiring young journalists sometimes lack
the necessary broader perspective, possibly because they are the
products of an age of niche marketing and personalized information.
They take all they can get on their favourite subject, but leave
the rest. As a result, they may know little about nine-tenths of what
is going on around them. However, there is a very good chance that
their readers will be sitting in the nine-tenths sector. What hope has
a teenager of reaching a person aged forty if he or she knows every
scrap of minutiae about a film star or sports personality, but thinks
the NASDAQ is a rock band from Seattle?
Of course, the web is one of the prime providers of such
personalized information, but the best web journalists are those
with a broader view. They consume other media. They even read
books.