Online Journalism - Ayo Menulis FISIP UAJY

3
From Photosetting to XML
The global media brands have perfected the presentation of news as
a finished and seamless product, packaged with the advertising
which capitalises it for instant and profitable consumption. While
news on the web is forcing a reconsideration of journalistic genres
and values, including a reassessment of that glossiness, it still adopts
the ‘characteristic organisation’ described by Raymond Williams as
‘sequence and flow’. It naturalises into the patterns of its consumers’
daily lives. Online news is arranged across the screen to fulfil itself
when we key in the URL (the Uniform Resource Locator – the distinctive
address for the page that will find it as long as it remains
available on the Internet) or link to the site. We immediately understand
the format – itself an intrinsic part of the news – and for the
most part there is no recognition of how it mediates events. The
front page of a news site like newsUnlimited appears with overviews
of the top ten or twenty stories of the day, including breaking news
and updates, with links to articles and the other associated material
which will allow the reader to negotiate it. Clearly, the production of
such an elaborate media text demands a complex of technology,
craft skills, professional knowledge and organisation. This chapter
examines how these elements are brought together to present the
news in a new and rapidly evolving medium.
Electronic publication should be significantly cheaper both to
produce and to distribute for media producers. Any savings,
however, remain speculative for most major producers as they make
significant initial capital investments sometimes, apparently, with
no immediate prospects of recouping them. The sheer scale of news