Online Journalism - Ayo Menulis FISIP UAJY

‘Undertakings of Great Advantage’ 163
based corporation Knight-Ridder, one of North America’s largest
newspaper owners, but in 1994 there were others – had gone online
in association with ISPs, in Knight-Ridder’s case AOL. News was
offered to the ISPs subscribers as an extra charged service with the ISP
taking a large proportion of the income. In the first nine months of
service Knight-Ridder attracted 5,300 customers. Resnick compared
Knight-Ridder’s progress with the Palo Alto Weekly, which had taken
the then novel approach of publishing an edition directly onto the
Internet. The non-subscription service, admittedly in what was
probably in 1994 the most wired neighbourhood on the planet,
received 4,500 hits in its first two weeks of operation. 13 Other titles,
notably the Raleigh News & Observer in North Carolina, Online
Wisconsin, an electronic news journal started at the University of
Wisconsin and Kommunal Rapport in Norway were also experimenting
with free access over the then new World Wide Web.
While the technology was clearly a very effective way of distributing
news, and consumers flocked to the sites, what those pioneers
needed was a way of setting their projects into a workable economy.
Bill Johnson, publisher of the Palo Alto Weekly believed that his
profits would come from classified adverts and display advertising
from real-estate brokers. ‘One of the neat things about the Internet
is that a small paper that serves a very focused area can, with
minimal effort, offer the community a way to engage in collective
dialogue.’ 14 His reasoning proved to be only partly right. In the
event specialist suppliers and national, even global providers, found
it just as easy to offer the service. On the web they could be simultaneously
as local as the Palo Alto Weekly or as global as Yahoo!
The Raleigh News & Observer undertook a more ambitious
approach and spent half a million dollars on a comprehensive,
largely free online service called Nando Land. It included email,
games, local and educational reference material with the electronic
edition of the newspaper available to every public school and other
community organisations in North Carolina. In 1994 Nando also
offered unlimited access to Reuters and AP news services and was one
of the first news providers with online archives. Less successfully, the
paper also attempted to launch an expanded subscription edition.
In blinkered adherence to the formula of ‘multiple revenue
streams’ (subscription, advertising and transactions) news publishers
continued to attempt to sell titles by subscription over the web for