1What is online journalism? - Ayo Menulis FISIP UAJY

68 Journalism Online
single elements of it, such as data analysis. The aims of this chapter
are modest – to demystify the process; to introduce several, but not
all, of the key areas of online research; and hopefully to whet the
appetite and encourage you to try it for yourself.
Too many people are deterred by their early forays online. If
you were offered 24,853 web pages to look at, after putting your
first simple query to a search engine, you are not likely to have
progressed to the wonders of newsgroups, listservs or even data
analysis (more language to daunt the faint hearted).
Turning your back on the Internet after an unhappy first
encounter may be one way of handling a fear of the unknown, but
it’s dubious journalistic practice. The only remedy is to cut
through the jargon, try things out, keep plugging away and see
what works for you.
The impact of online on research and reporting
As we have seen, there are two main tasks for the journalist – the
gathering of news materials and their dissemination. Researching
and reporting form the ‘gathering-in’ process, the first two of the
four stages detailed in Chapter 2. As we will see in this chapter,
online can have a striking impact on this work, helping you trace
information, come up with story ideas and find sources, contacts
and potential interviewees.
Then come the latter stages of story construction and publishing,
the selection and presentation of your information. That
‘sending-out’ or dissemination process, and how online makes it
distinctive, will be covered in later chapters. In this chapter, we
will concentrate on news gathering.
Four elements of ‘gathering in’
Using the bottom-up approach, we can identify the main elements
of research and reporting and consider how the use of online can
support them.
finding information – a broad heading, which could include
documents, data, photographs, audio, video (these tend to be
the more static artefacts);