Online Journalism - Ayo Menulis FISIP UAJY

110 Online Journalism
office in Baghdad, retains more overseas bureaux than all of its North
American competitors combined) and, excluding the Wall Street
Journal, the 1,600 US dailies employ only 186 foreign correspondents
in total. 26 In 1998, in an economic climate where that part of the
Western press corps reporting foreign news had been radically
reduced in numbers, the web must have appeared as a significant
bonus to media management’s loath to invest in yet another Balkan
war. Many stories did appear in European and North American titles
which were obviously ‘cut and paste’ journalism. Equally, by June
1999 there were over 100 websites dealing with aspects of the Kosovo
conflict and many of them were very effectively employed in sophisticated
and effective war reporting by many of the major global and
national news brands.
Perhaps unsurprisingly the most effective reporting from Kosovo
came from news providers such as the UK Guardian and the Los
Angeles Times which continued to invest in coverage from the war
zone. Matt Welch concludes his Online Journalism Review article,
‘Kosovo Highlights Journalism’s Failings’, with a salutary statistic:
‘Editors and publishers who insist that the public just doesn’t care
about international news should look again. CNN.com’s traffic went
up 963 per cent after the [Serbian] bombing started.’ 27 A decade after
the Gulf War, big media had apparently completely forgotten about
the crucial opportunity it had left for Ted Turner and CNN.
Significantly, by the time that Allied ground troops entered Kosovo,
the New York Times reported that 2,500 journalists accompanied
them.
The online reporting of Kosovo also highlighted problems around
both provenance and immediacy. In an arena of competing propagandas
from a range of sources, including NATO, it was important
that information be checked for accuracy before it was either
included in reportage or linked from news sites, and set in context.
Information coming from the Visoki Decani Monastery in Kosovo,
while it was undoubtedly ‘honest’, must, necessarily, be read
through a different filter from that used to comprehend information
from the US State Department or an Albanian website; the website
makes it clear that the orthodox monks are Serbs, albeit perhaps,
Serbs with a unique perspective on the war. To take mailings from
any single source out of context would be to risk producing a
severely distorted version of events.