Online Journalism - Ayo Menulis FISIP UAJY

78 Online Journalism
The development of online archives was one of web news’ early
successes. For some sites more than 30 per cent of news stories
looked at every day are in the archives. While some providers, such
as MSNBC, employ the same URL for each day’s front page, usually
archiving that material under a new URL, others, for instance the
Irish Times, leave old news online allowing readers and researchers to
readily set the latest news in context. Such access to the archives
enables journalists to assume informed readerships on subjects that
would otherwise have become lost. The unfolding of the Littleton
shootings was written in the context of earlier shootings and the
lessons that editors had drawn from them as well as from the North
American gun lobby and its critics. If another such outrage should
occur there is a mass of material available on news sites both in
Colorado and around the world on subjects as diverse as teenage
disaffection, gun legislation and trauma counselling to help readers
to place it in context and comprehend it. Those links enable readers
to capitalise on the arguments, information and knowledge of the
past and apply them to present crises in ways that, while they were
theoretically possible, were previously heavily mediated by media
professionals and difficult to effect before the web.
Before the web, newspaper archives were largely the musty
domain of professional researchers and journalism students.
Journalism was, by definition, current. The general accessibility of
archives has radically extended the shelf life of journalism, with older
stories now regularly cited to provide context for more current ones.
With regard to how meaning is made of complex issues encountered
in the news, this departure can be understood as a readiness by
online news consumers to engage with the underlying issues and
contexts of the news that was not apparent in, or even possible for,
print consumers. One of the emergent qualities of online news, determined
in part by the depth of readily accessible online archives,
seems to be the possibility of understanding news stories as the
manifest outcomes of larger economic, social and cultural issues
rather than ephemeral and unconnected media spectacles.
It is, however, over-optimistic to view the Internet as a kind of
contemporary Library of Alexandria. The average life of a web
document is 75 days after which, unless it has been copied to the
Internet Archive or another digital library such as the news titles’ own
archives, prospective readers will be returned the ubiquitous ‘404