Online Journalism - Ayo Menulis FISIP UAJY

The third level of interactivity, and possibly the most important
in political terms, is the potentiality of the web to encourage
communities of users, often from wide, even global, geographical
areas, through chat rooms and bulletin boards. News providers of all
kinds on the web use them to enable readers to mobilise around
specific issues or stories. Levels of traffic over the chat rooms on
Colorado news sites after the Columbine killings clearly reveals the
desire of people to communicate directly with each other over the
issues that concern them most deeply.
Ultimately, modes of user interactivity seem to reduce the amount
of control retained by the news producer. That control, usually
manifest in news filtering and agenda setting around what is seen to
be in the public interest, now accrues largely to the consumer and
this, more than its new media forms or the latest technology, is what
makes the web unique as a news carrier and holds out the greatest
promise for the future. News still reaches its consumers in mediated
forms but that mediation is increasingly removed from the hands of
(at least) local politicians and the corporations they legislate on
behalf of, entailing the unlamented loss of so-called ‘family values’
and the blind spots that arise when news becomes a commodity.
Disintermediation
The Nature of News 53
The roles that journalism assigned to itself in the mid-nineteenth
century, on the strength of its newly acquired professionalism, as
gatekeeper, agenda-setter and news filter, are all placed at risk when
its primary sources become readily available to its audiences. The
commentary, fact-checking and inflection that journalism places on
such material remain available to readerships as secondary texts but
the web itself has taken over the role of mediating those sources for
audiences. It generally applies a lighter touch. This disintermediation
effect also applies to retailers, legislators and book publishers;
e-commerce allows the web to adopt the role of intermediary in
business and politics as readily and effectively as it mediates news
and information. Shopkeepers and middle-ranking party functionaries
both lose their roles in the flattened hierarchical structures
determined by the web.
The UK Department of Trade and Industry’s ‘Future Unit’ report,
‘Converging Technologies’, 17 makes it clear that government, whose