Online Journalism - Ayo Menulis FISIP UAJY

36 Online Journalism
sites. What is clear is that online consumers still tend to take their
news from a range of media and forms. More than 40 per cent of the
Pew Center’s respondents indicated that they use the Internet to give
them more background and depth on stories that they have first
become aware of in the press or from broadcast news. This is now
changing as consumers keep a portal or aggregator page on their
screens keeping them informed of breaking news as they work. The
smaller online audiences prior to 1996 tended to come from social
groups which were more likely to be interested in news anyway and
indeed, even in 1998, Pew discovered that online consumers were
more likely to take a daily newspaper than the national average.
In America the broadcast news corporations websites are more
popular than newspaper sites. While Pew does not consider the
European situation, the same preference holds for the BBC News
Online site in the UK. In the US the preference is explained by the
fact that broadcast news sites attract national audiences and, historically,
there are no national newspapers in North America. Most
online newspaper sites attract a predominantly regional or even local
readership. In the period between 1996 and 1998 the MSNBC website
experienced the greatest increase in traffic, probably growing at
about the same rate as traffic on BBC News Online.
The 1998 Pew survey suggests that nearly half of online news
consumers felt that news organisations on the web were as accurate
as more traditional media and were more likely to give the larger
picture. At the same time, fewer web users considered news as a
priority in their list of demands. Probably the key finding of Pew in
1998 was that the audience of the web was a mass audience, no
longer with a predominance of college-trained, more affluent,
perhaps even male, consumers. The newer web users came from
socio-economic groups which were traditionally heavier-thanaverage
television watchers and from a younger constituency than
earlier users. Both of these groups hitherto relied primarily on TV
rather than the press for their news and tended to be more interested
in the headlines than in documentary and comment.
Conclusion
In 1997 James Fallows, the executive editor of US News & World
Report, contemplated the qualities of news and journalism on the
Internet with John McChesney of Hotwired.