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Online Journalism - Ayo Menulis FISIP UAJY

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The Information Society 23<br />

packages redundant. Portals, or gateways to the Internet, might be<br />

the front pages of global (Yahoo!, AOL), national (newsUnlimited,<br />

Liberation) or regional (ThisisCornwall) news provider websites. They<br />

provide links to news services, e-shopping, entertainment schedules<br />

and information from weather and tides to financial advice. Globally<br />

branded portals attract millions of visitors every day and, naturally,<br />

the advertising that goes with such volumes of traffic. However,<br />

portals are just as likely to be corporate or even an individual’s home<br />

pages. Personalised portal pages offering a range of regularly used<br />

links and perhaps components from other websites such as news<br />

tickers or ‘InfoFlashes’ and in some cases coupled with the use of<br />

intelligent agents will culminate in a news package that is fully<br />

personalised and totally specific. The personal home page is here<br />

transformed into a dynamic news source which could feature the<br />

latest news, financial information, weather forecasts, sports news and<br />

horoscopes. The ability of consumers to filter out so completely what<br />

for them is bad news clearly has significant cultural implications.<br />

Portals might look like simple indexes in the case of news aggregators<br />

such as UK provider Metaplus (metaplus.com) or can take quite<br />

complex magazine formats providing a large range of services.<br />

Yahoo! for instance, in addition to news, games, stock market<br />

quotes, city guides and other maps, provides web users with free<br />

home pages through its subsidiary GeoCities, phone directories<br />

through Four11, Internet shopping through ViaWeb, free email<br />

services through RocketMail, promotions through Yoyodyne<br />

Entertainment, online calendars through WebCal and online chat<br />

software through iChat. The portal company also operates a partnership<br />

arrangement with Rupert Murdoch’s Fox broadcasting<br />

network. The whole range of Fox products are promoted through<br />

Yahoo! which in turn is featured in regular advertisements in Fox<br />

programming. Disney employs the same strategy in featuring the<br />

logo of its Go portal on all of its TV output including the ABC<br />

network. Each new addition to Yahoo!’s portfolio and to Go’s<br />

exposure strengthens their ability to attract new users and the advertising<br />

which follows them. Portals also offer a range of search<br />

engines and provide summaries of the pages that they link to. There<br />

is, of course, no reason why anyone should not regularly use a good<br />

personalised portal page that they come across, or construct for<br />

themselves, in preference to one of the corporate brands.

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