Online Journalism - Ayo Menulis FISIP UAJY

From Photosetting to XML 89
This discursiveness also insists that the journalist should supply
depth to the story. It is no longer enough to merely cite the latest cut
in education funding and top it off with a couple of sound bites
defending and attacking it. Readers can now click through to other
levels of the story which will report previous cutbacks and investments
in education made by the present government and its
predecessors. They can compare, for example, provision of primary
education in the UK with that in other countries. They might even
be given some assessment of how previous cuts have manifested,
whether in larger class sizes, cancellation of building programmes or
other services, and whether the changes in funding might be justified
in terms of population growth or decline. Such stories might
also be personalised with a profile of a teacher in jeopardy of redundancy
or a child who now has to bus to school instead of walk. Issues
such as this will also generate significant volumes of reader correspondence
and the journalist can also usefully act as the moderator
for such exchanges on the subject. While all of these devices are seen
in traditional journalism they are very rarely used in concert; for
online journalism they are routine.
Perhaps the major development in online journalism involves the
direct incorporation of sources into stories. Where databases and
transcripts have been used in preparing news, readers are given direct
access to them. Using the Upmystreet.com model of extracting very
local information from government databases and correlating it with
other information, there is no reason why the journalist should not
give readers the possibility of using published information to understand
how cuts might affect them personally. How much exactly
would a 5 per cent cut amount to for my local education authority?
How many teachers’ salaries is that? How many ancillary hours? Any
ability to provide answers to such questions requires a new approach
to journalism. Eric Meyer suggests that the key dimensions of online
journalism are ‘depth, breadth and interaction’ 17 and that those
three aspects of any reporting will serve readers more significantly
than any formal aspects of the presentation of news. The principle
that emerges from this understanding is that ‘form should not drive
content. Content should drive form’. 18
Of course, the great benefit for journalists of any determining
form, which arrives complete with its set of defining conventions, is
brevity and the certainty that the story will be understood by its