Online Journalism - Ayo Menulis FISIP UAJY

56 Online Journalism
legitimate, and more profitable, to post gossip. ‘And his obsession is
to get the hottest Washington and Hollywood gossip and deliver it
to his network of readers as quickly as possible – before it’s printed
anywhere else.’ 21
Even for more conventional news stories the definitive interpretation
would not appear for days or weeks after the event and, of
course, one of the problems with such opinion pieces is that they
arrive packaged with all the weight of traditional journalistic values.
They propose a balanced, in-depth analysis of what might be a
complex social and cultural crisis. They are rarely offered for what
they are – opinion – and are used as a kind of banner pinned to the
newspaper’s masthead. Such journalism abandons the role of impartial
informer and adopts the advocacy of a particular position. In the
case of the Littleton killings there were clearly many other bodies
from the NRA to TV viewers’ groups who were more appropriately
fitted and willing to use the story to create such political leverage.
The Columbine School Killings
Disasters and tragedies, while they can bring massive boosts to circulation,
also bring with them new problems, opportunities and
responsibilities to reporters and news providers. The reporting of the
Columbine School killings makes an illuminating case study of how
news is disseminated on the web, with some of its implications. As
might have been anticipated the story of the killing spree at
Columbine High School in Colorado produced large spikes in the
flow of traffic across Denver’s news sites and gave those organisations
their first experience of a global audience.
In April 1999 two senior students, members of a small dissaffected
group calling themselves the Trenchcoat Mafia, entered the High
School in Littleton, Colorado, with guns, ammunition and explosives.
Their subsequent attack left 15 people, mostly teenagers, dead
and 24 injured. The event completely dominated the North American
and the world’s media for several days afterwards, taking the lead
from the Kosovo crisis, which was becoming more entrenched and
serious for European peace by the day, and diminishing it to a place
in ‘the rest of the news’. The web was not merely one of the channels
used to report the event. A Gallup poll taken a week after the killings
indicated that 80 per cent of Americans considered that the Internet