1What is online journalism? - Ayo Menulis FISIP UAJY

44 Journalism Online
It helps them to raise their sights, place their work in context
and introduce their readers to the serendipity factor – in other
words, to encourage them to venture beyond the ‘Daily Me’ to find
something on the site and elsewhere that they did not know they
would like, something new. This isn’t subverting people’s ability to
choose what they want on the web. It’s supplementing it. However,
to do it, the journalist needs a wider horizon than many of his or
her readers.
It is easy to overstate the problem. Some young journalists do
the sort of work where their knowledge and love of the minutiae
of contemporary culture serves them very well. Others have that
broader perspective and even understand the value of history as
an essential context. But too many do not. So they gravitate
towards stories of little interest to their usually older readership.
When they do cover the areas their readers want, they frequently
do not know either what has happened or been said in previous
coverage. They also waste a lot of time stumbling blindly around
the structures that bind the apparently alien worlds of, for
example, local politics, financial services or health authorities.
Know your structures
These worlds, and all others, operate within a series of interlinked
structures and systems. Local politics, for example, has a
structure of elected representatives working with local government
officials. It has another structure dividing the authorities
between very local, local and regional. Yet another structure
divides the work of the authority into different departments and
another provides a system of committees of elected representatives
for each department. It has a party political system for the
elected representatives and an electoral system that defines the
constituency for each elected representative, when they will be
elected and by which electoral method. On one level, we inhabit a
world of structures and systems.
Unless you are a specialist correspondent, you do not have to
know everything about a particular field such as local politics.
However, you should have a working knowledge of the key
structures and systems. Journalists, it is said, have to know a little