Online Journalism - Ayo Menulis FISIP UAJY

The Nature of News 55
time). The complicity that is engendered through that involvement
is reinforced by participants’ accounts of the same event and the
whole is ‘quick frozen’. The account can, at best, be only partially
true and yet it is increasingly placed on record as instant history. It
concretises as fact as it is returned to, in its archival form, for a whole
range of reasons including teaching, documentary and history itself.
Such accounts remain the crucial sources which subsequent historians,
journalists, students and professional researchers will turn to
first. They are to be found in the archives of the global news
producers which will doubtless continue to disseminate histories
which support the winner. My chapter on the reporting of the
Kosovo crisis of 1999 suggests that it is more difficult to achieve a
social sanction for such deterministic and instant histories in an
information-rich environment like the web. The establishment of
disinformation (official or otherwise) will get harder as realisation of
the complexity of events is forced by the sheer range of sources on
the web. Instant concretised history may well be one of the first casualties
of the web.
The 24-hour news cycle that is commonplace on the web
produces a culture of ‘breaking news’. News appears online as it
happens and the implications of this are that it is still undigested
even by those presenting and commenting upon it. The web also
gives consumers the opportunity to source their news, as it breaks,
from local providers. In the case of the Columbine School killings in
Littleton, Colorado, in 1999, versions of the story began to unfold
while the situation was still going on. Broadcast news followed close
behind but it would not appear in print for several hours. The first
reports merely attempted to comprehend the situation and it would
be some time before commentary sought to understand the event
and begin to allocate the blame.
The web forces both audiences and journalists to rethink news to
accommodate this idea of the ‘first draft’. Some such drafts will be
announcements of breaking stories that will be expanded in later
versions. Others, such as local reports on traffic snarl-ups or stories
which rapidly conclude, the bridge-jumper who changes his mind,
will never merit a full-length piece. The danger for news values is
that, in the view of journalists such as Matt Drudge, the publisher of
the Drudge Report, such unconfirmed news inevitably includes gossip
and if it is legitimate to post breaking news to the web it is just as