Online journalism is not new for Bangladesh. It’s now common for all. If you have writing ability you should established yourself as an online journalist. With the boom of the Internet, and businesses, corporations and organizations moving online, it seems only logical the industry that prides itself on informing people first should take that step also. However, journalism also prides itself on telling the truth and being accountable for the pieces written – the Internet hardly seems a likely home for an organization concerned with the truth.
Online journalism, or e-journalism, or cyber news, is journalism practiced online and whereas traditional media is linear, online journalism takes a non-linear approach to news.
Journalism is any non-fiction or documentary narrative that reports or analyzes facts and events firmly rooted in time (either topical or historical), which are selected and arranged by reporters, writers and editors to tell a story from a particular point of view. Journalism has traditionally been published in print, presented on film, and broadcast on television and radio. ‘Online’ includes many venues. Most prominent is the World Wide Web, plus commercial online information services like America Online. Simple Internet e-mail also plays a big role. Also important are CD-ROMs (often included with a book) linked to a web site or other online venue, plus intranets and private dial-up bulletin board systems.
When congress released the Starr Report on the Web, making it instantly available to the public, the game changed. No waiting for journalists to digest material before telling you about it. It was right there, right away Online journalism, using the tools mentioned (as well as many others) creates interactivity between journalist and audience that is hard to come by using traditional media, which is mostly one-sided – a newscaster spewing the news, a story in a newspaper, a radio clip.
A good example is the letter to the editor. E-mail, in conjunction with newspaper’s creating an online edition, has all but erased the long wait for your letter to be published.
An online edition can post the letter within minutes of receiving it and the audience has the ability to comment as soon as it is posted.
These abilities create far more interaction between audience and reporter than ever before. The reporter must always keep in mind the audience when writing. With an online edition, the reporter can be called out and have to justify their decision or word choice almost immediately.
Online journalism also allows a reporter the use of images, video, and audio they may not have been privy to in the print media. Online media also allows a person to browse at their own leisure – to decide what they want to read and when they want to read it.
Television and radio have become background noise for most people. However, when a person is sitting at a computer, they are likely not concentrating on other things. They have everything there for them at the click of a button.
Real Simple Syndication (RSS) feeds play a large roll in simplifying media on the Internet. RSS feeds need software like NewsNetWire (NNW) to work. The reader selects a topic for the RSS feed from the NNW program. The feed produces a headline and when the headline is clicked, a short blurb (usually the lede) appears, giving the reader some information on the topic and a link to the whole story. A reader can usually decide if the story is what they’re looking for from the blurb.
The Internet allows news and information to move at a tremendous dispatch, limited only by the speed of the electron or electromagnetic wave. The immediacy brought by the online environment, a medium where everyone is a potential publisher, allows for even less deliberation by the journalist and editor. Matter of anonymity, identity, access to information, and protection of intellectual property impact the practice of online journalism.3
Another tool, blogging, has taken the mainstream media by storm in the past year and with Dan Rather’s mistake, blogging is now seen as a news faux pas. Yes, blogs can be used as a diary of sorts, shared with family and friends, but blogs can also be used as tools for a journalist to help improve writing and research skills.
A student is expected to research and use facts and numbers when discussing a topic in a blog. It is not to be used for idle chatter or personal grudges, the blog is used to reflect and question.
There are also comment sections on the blog sites. If someone disagrees with a blog, a retort is simply a click away. Creating these comment venues again engages the audience and reduces reaction time.
Blogs, combined with search engines like Google or Excite, also have a way of drawing in new audiences. As blogging becomes more and more popular, blogs are appearing at the beginning of search engine lists due to the high traffic on them.
Someone could search for a topic and have thirty blogs come up.
However, with the Dan Rather incident, people are weary of trusting bloggers. Blogs are not a means of information, they’re a means to discuss information a person has found or found interesting. They are not meant to be taken as the ‘gospel of news’ they are simply a forum for discussion.
However, in the next few years, blogs should arise as a pertinent gateway for information for journalists. With schools taking on the challenge to educate new journalists on the rules of blogging as a journalist (these rules don’t apply to all the blogging world but all journalists should be aware of them), journalism blogs could soon no longer be a news faux pas. The new journalists writing these blogs are the journalists of the future and if they’re educated properly, the mystery and enigma of blogging may disappear.
Search engines play a huge roll in online journalism. Google, Excite and Yahoo, provide an easy instrument to search the web in just seconds.
The problem with search engines arises when information you don’t need appears in the first page of your search. Although Google offers pages upon pages of informative websites, the site you’re looking for does not always appear first – the search engine sorts based on most visited links. If it is not in the first page, a person usually feels the search unsuccessful and tries again using a different word or combination of words.
The Internet, the largest tool of them all, also offers the most problems.
The Internet allows millions of people to access the online edition of any paper, providing they have an online edition. It also offers up the opportunity to be overlooked as unaccountable and basically lying.
When digital cameras became the must-have for journalists, there was a serious concern for edited pictures. Crop here, change some of the levels there; is the picture still the same? Yes.
Crop here, change some of the levels, erase the pimple on that man’s forehead; is the picture still the same? No. Simply removing that man’s pimple means the picture has been altered.
As with digital imaging, it is all about being truthful. Journalism students are taught they are to report the truth, as they are a voice for the people. With the help of this education perhaps the Internet will not be seen as a cesspool for lies and untruths.
The University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication posts the Online Journalism Review (OJR), a web-based journal.
We also believe standards used in traditional media can and should be applied online. Journalism ethics, developed over centuries help keep a line between commercial and editorial functions, the goal being to maintain a publication’s credibility and trustworthiness. A news outlet that lacks veracity loses its role as a reliable truth teller, whether on the web, in print or on the airwaves.
The Web is a collaborative medium, not read-only like a magazine. In fact, the first Web browser was also an editor, though most people today think of browsing as primarily viewing, not interacting. To promote a more collaborative environment, we must build a ‘Web of Trust’ that offers confidentiality, instils confidence, and makes it possible for people to take a responsibility for (or to be accountable for) what they publish on the Web.
The Internet rules appear to be the same as the rules of online journalism – a collaborative medium, build a web of trust and make people responsible (or accountable) for their work (their actions and words).
So why are journalists weary of the web; perhaps the overabundance of entertainment, trivia and pornography has turned them off. Or the amount of personal content thrown up on the web. Journalists are still fighting for credibility among an enterprise that runs on games and porn advertisements.
A solution to this problem could be to create a new domain for news organizations. Instead of searching for dot-com domains, perhaps the mass media should have a dot-news domain.
The Internet will always be around. It may get tweaked and ideas thrown around, but it has become a staple in our society and a useful tool for journalists.
Hyperlinking has become a very useful tool. Inserting a hyperlink into a story allows a person to jump right to the document you’re sourcing from. The link (inserted in the story) can be to a document, another story, or a website. Hyperlinks help prove a point. If someone questions a person’s sources, they can simply direct them to the hyperlink in the story and the original document they got the information from.
Obviously, hyperlinks can only be used online; linking in a newspaper story would be useless.
But where to link to? Government websites and well-known organizations are trustworthy enough, but do journalists leave themselves open to libel if they link to a site of ‘seedy’ information?
If a Web news organization fails time-honored ethical tests, it mutates into something else; entertainment or perhaps a fount of possible, innuendo and sensationalism. If the site does not harm people, through libel, exploitation or bigotry, then it deserves a place in cyberspace. But we believe that such site should not be viewed as journalism. (A parallel might be a comparison between Olympic and professional wrestling. Both are wrestling but each operates under different rules and serves different athletic gods.)6
So linking to sites not fully investigated sets the news organization into a different category, not news.
But hyperlinks produce a way for the writer to be accountable without even answering any questions. Perhaps then hyperlinks are the lazy form of journalism. Or they take away from interactivity.
Hyperlinks will continue to be useful tools for journalists, but an over-use of them could taint their credibility. Linking only to sites that have verified, correct information is an important clause of this tool.
Although almost all newspapers have online editions, not all are acceptant of this newmedium. At the 2005 British Press Awards, the best news sites were excluded from the awards for the second year in a row. The organizers claimed the categories (best online news site and online journalist) didn’t attract enough entries and the entries that were submitted were not up to par.
"Virtually every newspaper now has a website and I don’t understand why they are not included in these awards," editor of the British national newspaper Sun Online, Pete Picton, said in an interview with ‘dot journalism’ on Dec. 7. "News sites are very much a part of how the industry operates."
Avril Williams, editorial director of Associated New Media accused the editors of being out of touch with readers’ habits and believes the editors are in danger of marginalizing one of the most innovated areas of journalism.
With the introduction of Internet-friendly cell phones, iPods, and Palm Pilots the world is seeing a movement towards wireless media. Instead of picking up a newspaper a person can simply pick up their laptop and surf the Internet for the news they’re looking for and they want to read; they choose. The media moguls should be looking to the Internet as a revolution. It’s clear almost everyone in the world is connected and looking for new, smaller ways to connect themselves. Instead of criticizing online media, the newspapers and TV stations should be welcoming it with open arms and looking to set boundaries for webnews that will increase the credibility of news websites.
Although online journalism is still new, newspapers are realizing it is the way news is going. It seems like a logical process – word of mouth, newspapers/magazines, now the Internet. So if want to be journalist you never depended on any newspaper or news media. Internet creates scope to become journalist. So anyone who interest to write try to became online journalist .
Muhammad Azizur Rahman
freelance journalist
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