Online Journalism - Ayo Menulis FISIP UAJY

182 Online Journalism
recent past. Reich makes it clear that ‘electronic capitalism … enables
the most successful to secede from the rest of society’ that the moral
link of capital to the community has been severed.
The word ‘community’ right now is very appealing … connotes
very appealing images. But in reality, very few people live in
socioeconomically diverse townships. In fact, we are, as a nation,
segregated by income to a much larger extent than ever before.
Zip Code marketing has become the rage because marketers know
that where we live has a lot to do with what we can afford to buy.
And remember that the local tax is still the major revenue source
for schools, libraries, infrastructure, and many social services. It’s
not surprising, therefore, that we’re seeing a wider and wider
divergence between the public services available to those living in
very wealthy suburbs and exurbs and people who are in workingclass
and poor towns. 40
The process that Reich describes is accelerated by electronic capitalism,
in which the information sectors, including media and news
providers, are not constrained by national borders. The financial
news sector, and to a lesser extent what was traditionally considered
as the broadsheet press, is geared to a global readership, but hardly a
contemporary mass readership. More importantly, it is a readership
that can be readily understood as a community, one for which a
shared media provide common social and institutional understandings
weaving identity for their subjects as nation states and regions
have done in the past. Such an understanding of media foregrounds
the work of journalism especially in its roles of gatekeeping and
agenda-setting.
Reich’s conclusions impact heavily on those industries at the
breaking edge of the information economy – the media providers.
The rapidity with which electronic capitalism grinds though its
business cycles constantly puts the brands at risk. Just as in other
markets, news media face an economy of lowered costs and global
audiences in which opportunities can be identified, exploited and
dissolved in weeks or months rather than decades. Thus the largescale
media spectacles such as the Olympics will see opportunist
news sites spring up to capitalise upon them and move on. Similarly
we have already noted the traffic that is drawn to the online media