Online Journalism - Ayo Menulis FISIP UAJY

70 Online Journalism
As the inverted pyramid structure of the traditional print news
story adds progressively further layers of detail to the bald headline
that it commences with, a complementary flow opens the reading
with a plurality of meaning(s) which are discounted until a single
final truth is determined upon. The final all-encompassing version
ties all the narrative elements together and comprises the definitive
meaning or truth which explains the story. Even in instances where
the story derives from a variety of sources, these will be given appropriate
inflections to allow such a resolution. For lead stories,
especially those concerning war, politics and morality, this truth will
often be repeated and underpinned in the opinion/editorial section
of the paper.
Online news stories are not so easily shoehorned into the inverted
pyramid shape and their many strands might be more comfortably
expressed as a net or matrix. This more complex narrative form
achieves readerly gratification through ‘patterns of exploration and
discovery’ 5 rather than any tendentious and partisan closure. Readers
are able to become more roundly informed but they are less likely to
meet the truths or sureties of traditional op/ed sections. Online journalism
claims to do no more than bring some parts of the story
together in what the reader strives to secure as a comprehensible
structure. As is clear from the form itself, neither reader nor journalist
can assume that all the parts are present or even available. The mystification
that is routinely practised by traditional journalism on this
account, through the spurious claim to comprehensive, even total,
coverage, is not available to the online journalist.
Any understanding of the story which ensues is dependent on the
narrative trajectory and context which the reader weaves around it.
Janet Murray describes this as mapping the story. She points out the
importance of an effective and informed navigation process and how
association can completely change the meaning of each lexia
through its juxtaposition with different information. She cites Lev
Kuleshov’s demonstration in the 1920s of how ‘audiences will take
the same footage of an actor’s face as signifying appetite, grief, or
affection depending on whether it is juxtaposed with images of a
bowl of soup, a dead woman, or a little girl playing with a teddy
bear’. 6 Along with the loss of control over the positioning or context
of their writing, the lexias that precede or follow it, the journalist
loses the ability to either resolve it or determine its meaning. While