Online Journalism - Ayo Menulis FISIP UAJY

162 Online Journalism
from advertisers’ money through ideological, ethnic or other affiliations
regarded by big business as unpopular or unhelpful.
Brown describes the spirit of the post-1970s for mainstream media
producers as a ‘spendthrift techno-romanticism … when many
papers were seduced into ill-advised ventures in audio and videotex
services. There were deals with cable TV companies, and by the mid-
1980s many newspapers were hoping to cash in delivering their
product by fax. That none of these gambits really caught the public’s
imagination didn’t stop newspapers from piling into cyberspace’. 10
Perhaps the Gadarene rush can be explained by a closer look at the
economics of the industry.
The News Online
One of the key junctures in the development of the printed press, as
it is understood through the Whig interpretation of its history, was
the move from capitalisation by political and class factions,
including the state, to ‘financial independence’, recognised by
Marxist historians as a euphemism for dependency on advertising
revenue. It is more like an addiction; Bagdikian assesses it as a ‘5-to-
1 dependence on advertisers … Newspapers, magazines and
broadcasters in 1981 collected $33 billion a year from advertisers and
only $7 billion from their audiences … [It] has insulated these media
from the wishes of their audiences’. 11 A seamless continuation of
that relationship exists, or was assumed to exist by sources of capital,
between news on the Internet and advertising, involving similar
opportunities and tensions between consumers, providers and advertisers
and based on the same understanding – that the media
provider’s primary product is the delivery of an agreed quantity and
quality of readers. Content, news or entertainment, is not merely
incidental to that end. It is the bait. The Internet brought the added
advantages, where there is no need for advertisers to limit themselves
to a 30 second off-peak slot, of unlimited space and time as
well as the ability to quantify usage very specifically in markets in
which every consumer can be individually targeted and catered to
with a personalised media mix.
Rosalind Resnick, writing in mid-1994 12 describes what was then
a brave, perhaps even foolhardy departure, for news publishing on
the Internet. Hitherto, news providers – she mentions the California-