Online Journalism - Ayo Menulis FISIP UAJY

88 Online Journalism
When newsUnlimited was launched in 1998 it contained, for
instance, a twice-daily column, ‘Guardian Eye’, written by Derek
Brown. Brown’s experience as a foreign correspondent and his idiosyncratic
and witty commentary gave newsUnlimited a real edge on
many other online news providers.
The critical thinking which will enable the journalist to structure
information around organising principles geared to readerly interaction
and the narratives which will produce it is crucial. Stories no
longer have to be shoehorned into the headline, photograph and
column format or thirty seconds of footage and a soundbite. There
will be occasions when such approaches are appropriate and they
make perfect sense on the web, but the online journalist also has the
opportunity to employ a wide range of other forms which might
better meet the demands of the story. An awareness of the images,
graphics, audio and text that readers are likely to be drawn to as entry
points in the story is clearly important. Online editors must also be
able to deal with video and audio, and, because of the exigencies of
rolling deadlines, at a speed that is more akin to broadcast newsrooms
than print. The convention of indexed headline-type links not
only offers a formation of stories or story elements but can also
suggest in what order the parts of the story are to be read. Clearly this
can be a much more erratic and wide-ranging process than it is for
print news publishing and the journalist needs to be aware of an
array of entry points to the story and multiple viewpoints within it.
The online news story will therefore comprise a much larger
document, or set of documents, than its print or broadcast counterpart.
It will offer clearly delineated points of entry to a broad
spectrum of readers, each of whom comes with different demands
upon the story. The announcements of cuts in primary education,
for example, will be read very differently by educationalists, parents,
taxpayers and those in parallel employment sectors. The story might
begin with, and be about, savings and tax reductions serving politicians
and taxpayers. For others it will mean impoverished provision
and perhaps carry with it the threat of similar cuts in other areas. The
story has radically different implications for these various readers,
and online journalism, unlike earlier news media which tended to
simplify and encase such events in a monolithic meaning, has the
space to examine the whole range of positions and discourses which
are implicated.