Online Journalism - Ayo Menulis FISIP UAJY

90 Online Journalism
readers on the terms of the journalism that produces it. For the print
journalist the story, with its accompanying images, can be wordprocessed
to length and despatched to print. The broadcast
journalist will compile a similar package, again to length, and deliver
it to the newsroom. For the online journalist neither space nor time
are a determining constraint in the same way and the prospect is
altogether more daunting. The crucial skill lies in understanding
how the stories (not story) will be told. Those multiple viewpoints
and layers of information will be set against one another to gain an
understanding of the issues and their contexts. Having gathered the
raw information and decided how it might be presented the project
becomes a team effort in which the producer, or production team,
applies a range of technologies to the information to meet the form
of its presentation. As this chapter indicates, at least three distinct
roles are emerging in online newsrooms: those of journalist,
producer and editor.
The questioning of the rules of traditional journalism does not
mean that they should automatically be discarded. On the contrary,
as readers become aware of the importance of verifying all information
on the web, editorial rigour needs to be enhanced by journalists
wishing to protect the integrity of their profession and the reputation
of their title. Web publishing is not necessarily instant
publishing. While its emphasis has changed, the editorial role of
gatekeeper is still applied and a similar set of questions moderates
the process. ‘Is this reporting appropriate for the title?’, whether that
be BBC News Online or The Onion. ‘Will our consumers wish to read
this?’ Information needs to be checked and rechecked. The axiom
incidentally explains why this book is about ‘online journalism’
rather than the more general overview of online news. The journalist,
more than the producer or the editor, is responsible for the
content of news. I have tried to stress that online journalism is
content driven, more so than other news forms, and it is that
content, not the latest design fashion or media technology, that
readers look for online. The axiom can lead journalism into novel
and highly productive situations such as the Financial Times’s highly
innovative Wimbledon coverage in 1999 or the Washington Post’s
feature, ‘Chapter One’, which places the first chapter of newly
published books online and links them to the paper’s reviews. Both
of these ideas are resolutely content driven and draw global audi-