Online Journalism - Ayo Menulis FISIP UAJY

The Information Society 17
decade, reported $86 million in revenues for the first three months
of 1999. While that represented an increase by a factor of three on
the previous year’s total and a leap in profits by a factor of ten to
$20.6 million for the quarter, it was derisory compared to corporations
in other sectors with equivalent capitalisation. In the late 1990s
it seemed that all of the global media conglomerates were content to
continue making substantial investments to establish their presence
on the new medium while awaiting its potential to mature. Discovery
Channel Online, for instance, spent more than $8 million setting up
its website for an advertising revenue of about one quarter of investment
over the first two years.
The confusion might seem to be shared by readers who are overwhelmed
by choice. In a medium which encourages such a massive
proliferation of voices how do readers select those which offer trustworthy
news? Can the same criteria they once used to select their
daily paper or broadcast news apply? Will the news industry itself
remain viable when, as in the case of the attempt to impeach the
president of the United States, everyone can read the Starr Report for
themselves and click directly to an unlimited choice of comment
upon it? Much of that comment will be produced by readers very like
themselves. What role is there now for the journalist? When a news
event of note occurs, global or local, people email each other. They
recommend websites related to the event, often the primary sources,
websites which are only rarely those of the large media corporations.
The NATO war in Kosovo in 1999 led to an estimated 30–40 per
cent gain in traffic for Western news sites, especially the brand name
websites such as BBC News Online, but many readers, millions, were
constructing their own story of the war, at least in part, from sites in
Serbia and the Balkans as well as the UK Ministry of Defence, NATO
and the refugee aid organisations. This has dramatic implications for
news management by military and government institutions. Many
people at work and at home take their news, as it breaks, from sites
operating in the background as they work or play on their PCs, televisions
and telephones. During times of crisis we might expect
significant increases in such behaviour.
Finally, there is the issue of bandwidth itself. While the Internet
enables an effectively unlimited number of channels the capacity of
some of those channels, especially the premium content providers,
BBC, CNN and Go, etc., to supply more and more information,