1What is online journalism? - Ayo Menulis FISIP UAJY

Online research and reporting 73
this, we could have a fairly accurate guess of where it came
from.
This is valuable when you are trying to find a site or when you
have a URL and are trying to ascertain who it belongs to (you may
not have a PC to hand at the time). It is also a simple but effective
first lesson in demystifying the Web.
So you are looking for a specific web site and know the name of
the organization that hosts it, you can try to guess the URL. For
example, if you wanted the site of ‘Ward’s Wonder Widgets’, you
could try each of the following into the white address box near the
top of your page:
www.wardswonderwidgets.com;
www.wardswidgets.com; or
www.wonderwidgets.com.
Web site addresses often use initials. So in this case, you could
also try the key sticking www.www.com (the initial www stands for
World Wide Web).
If you know that Ward’s Wonder Widgets are based in the UK,
you can replace the suffix .com with .co.uk in any of the above
instances.
How to look further
So now you know there are many different forms of document on
the web but that each can be identified by its URL. You could
carry on bookmarking ones you know and trying to guess others,
but to leave it there would be to see only a single snowflake on the
tip of this iceberg of information. To discover the true value of the
web as a resource, you will have to search it.
Before you do this, you must ask yourself two important
‘bottom-up’ questions.
What type of information am I looking for? Deconstruct the
potential story and look at its component parts. What sort of
information, opinion and data will help to develop the story or
help to brief you?