1What is online journalism? - Ayo Menulis FISIP UAJY
1What is online journalism? - Ayo Menulis FISIP UAJY
1What is online journalism? - Ayo Menulis FISIP UAJY
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Online research and reporting 71<br />
When confronted with a keyboard, a screen and a fantastically<br />
soph<strong>is</strong>ticated plaything like the Web, the overwhelming urge <strong>is</strong> to<br />
dive in. Th<strong>is</strong> <strong>is</strong> fine and you should indulge yourself. But, then<br />
switch off your computer before it switches you off. At an early<br />
stage, learn to think as clearly as possible about what you are<br />
looking for before you go <strong>online</strong>.<br />
Types of web site<br />
First, if it helps, think of the different kinds of site that ex<strong>is</strong>t on the<br />
web and make a l<strong>is</strong>t. You will see that like any collection, you can<br />
introduce categories, such as those suggested in Chapter 1. That<br />
alone begins to reduce the Web to more manageable proportions<br />
(no, don’t stop to think how many documents are in each of your<br />
categories, it’s pointless).<br />
Uniform resource locators and domains<br />
Next, all sites have an address, which <strong>is</strong> known as the uniform<br />
resource locator (URL). Every page on every site will have its own<br />
d<strong>is</strong>tinctive address with the site URL as its root.<br />
So the URL for the BBC site <strong>is</strong> bbc.co.uk. If you want the main<br />
weather page, the URL <strong>is</strong> bbc.co.uk/weather.<br />
URLs have a great deal to answer for. They are responsible for<br />
the dreaded ‘dotcom’ entering our vocabulary (.com <strong>is</strong> the ending<br />
of the web addresses for many of the recent Internet start-up<br />
companies). They are also the bane of broadcasters’ lives as they<br />
labour on air through ‘wwws’ and ‘forward slashes’, cross-trailing<br />
web sites on telev<strong>is</strong>ion and radio.<br />
However, URLs do have their uses. Once you know the URL of<br />
a site, you can ask your computer to ‘bookmark’ it (‘bookmark’ <strong>is</strong><br />
usually on the toolbar at the top of the page or ‘favourites’ if you<br />
use Internet Explorer). It will then be added to a l<strong>is</strong>t of stored sites<br />
that you can return to in the future without further searching. If a<br />
site changes its URL, it will usually leave a link to its new URL on<br />
the old page (a little like forwarding mail).<br />
URLs are also like postal addresses because they can say<br />
something about the person or organization that resides there.
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