Online Journalism - Ayo Menulis FISIP UAJY

Introduction
This book relates the story of news journalism’s encounter with the
World Wide Web. It conspicuously avoids words such as ‘cyberspace’
and ‘virtuality’ and the arguments, which already look anachronistic,
around their implicit techno-utopias and dystopias. The short
history of the web has certainly seen enough utopian claims that
corporate and political hierarchies could be tumbled by a technology
they could no longer control and their power dispersed into every
conceivable kind of community, and I have tried to reflect some of
these. In contrast, the web is also the site of moves by media
conglomerates vigorously gearing-up for global pre-eminence and a
new kind of hegemony. The two trends do not entirely contradict
each other. With regard to its determining effects on culture and
society, the web itself remains neutral even while it becomes the
conduit for new power configurations and relations predicated upon
a new corporate ideology.
The tendency of information technology is inherently conservative
rather than revolutionary; it cannot easily leapfrog its own
technical and compatibility standards. The changes in journalism
explored by this book, while closely associated with the Internet, are,
accordingly, traced to other determinisms: the globalisation of
ownership, the widespread deregulation of broadcast news media,
entrepreneurial risk economies seeking private money and initiatives,
the mobilisation of new power relationships with the fall of the
Iron Curtain and a whole spectrum of changes in social and cultural
mores from reading habits to new routes to identity and subjectivity.
The journalisms enabled by the web are driven by an agenda-setting