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Diversity of Journalisms. Proceedings of ECREA/CICOM Conference, Pamplona, 4-5 July 2011
means that the news are presented in a simplified, personalized and dramatized way
and the most important news value is the attractiveness of the story. Tabloidization as
a contemporary media trend has effects for the common information basis for
democratic society.
Another strategy for old media to respond to the challenge made by online journalism
is to offer more detailed stories in the print versions, using various dramaturgical and
visual ways of telling stories and trying to foresee subsequent news events and
contextualizing the news. My argument is that printed newspapers can not be only
newspapers in the future but they have to find new ‘ecological niche’ to survive in
changing media system. The future of newspapers is being more context-papers,
analyse-papers, speculation-papers and foresee-papers.
Online journalism at the present makes greater use of the ‘inverted pyramid’ structure
in combination with hyperlinks. The news topics are in general ‘softer’ but stories are
more dramatised and try to offer stronger reading experiences than the news in the
print media. Online news stories are typically glancing media, they are not written for
concentrated reading. Search engine optimization affects headlines, because
journalists are trying to write most interesting and best selling headlines.
One interesting online journalism innovation is online feature journalism. When
journalism in new media proliferates and becomes increasingly diversified, old styles
and genres of journalism will transform and new ones will emerge. Online feature
journalism is still strongly developing journalism genre and probably it will grow into
one significant genre of the future of online journalism. The adaptation of feature
genre family to online newspapers may enhance the status of online journalism and
the professional role of online journalists.
To summarize, online news journalism is becoming more commercialized, more
localized and softer, while at the same time opening up towards a more deliberative,
and more opinion oriented approach to news: news comments, like blogs and
interactivity between journalists and readers have more significance in online news
journalism than in print journalism. At the same time commercialization leads online
news presentation towards to the ‘tabloidization’: the news are presented in a more
simplified, personalized and dramatized way and the most important news value is
the attractiveness of the story.
End Note
Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to doctoral student
Panu Uotila, Department of Communication, P.O. Box 35, FI-40014 University of
Jyväskylä, Finland. E-mail: panu.uotila@jyu.fi
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