Online Journalism - Ayo Menulis FISIP UAJY
Online Journalism - Ayo Menulis FISIP UAJY
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.