1What is online journalism? - Ayo Menulis FISIP UAJY

70 Journalism Online
budgets and similar material. ‘But if you are talking about major,
month-long, big series, heavy analysis, it’s still a very small
proportion of US newsrooms that invest in that.’ 2
Paul talks about the ‘gradations of CAR’. She points out that
simply using the Internet to find people and information is one
form of computer assisted reporting and that this is becoming
widespread among reporters in the UK and other countries
outside the United States. She also suggests that UK journalists
could look beyond the big government data sets and compile their
own material:
Over time you might compile individual incidents. These
cumulatively may reveal certain trends . . . data about
production, or trade or economic issues or the Royal budget
is absolutely within the power of UK journalism and I think
that’s starting to be seen.
Sources of information on CAR are listed at the end of this
chapter.
Finding information – the World Wide Web
You need information at every stage of the news identification and
collection process. Not just specific information to develop your
story, but contextual stuff that will bolster your knowledge of
underpinning structures and current affairs.
Much of the information available online is posted on the World
Wide Web. Recent studies put the number of documents on the
Web at over one billion, and this is estimated to grow to over 13
billion pages by 2004.
This is where the trouble starts. Such quantities rattle the
senses. You literally do not know where to begin and there is
further discouragement. The Web is not like a library and it does
not have a single comprehensive catalogue or an ordered system
of storage.
So what do you do? You take a deep breath and start to look for
the different sorts of order that exist within the apparent chaos.
2 Interview with author, June 2000.