Online Journalism , livre ebook
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English
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2001
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271
pages
English
Ebooks
2001
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Publié par
Date de parution
20 février 2001
Nombre de lectures
1
EAN13
9781849645232
Langue
English
Poids de l'ouvrage
1 Mo
Online journalism is revolutionising the way news is reported and read. The rise of the internet has forever changed the way audiences interact with the news – stories are posted the moment they break and readers routinely expect to be able to access both the news sources and local perspectives. Online news and the pattern of media ownership raise a number of urgent questions about accuracy, press autonomy, freedom of speech and economic exclusion.
Jim Hall provides a comprehensive guide to the emerging field of cyberjournalism and examines the issues it raises. Looking at how interactive texts are both written and read, the book surveys the new technologies and conventions that online journalism has ushered in. The author uses case studies such as Monicagate and the war in Kosovo to illustrate both the opportunities and the limitations of cyberjournalism.
It is designed as a text to introduce how cyberjournalism works and how it can be used in innovative ways.
Introduction
1. The Information Society
2. The Nature Of News
3. From Phototypesetting To Xml
4. Armageddon.Com: Homepages And Refugees
5. ‘Too Fresh To Be True’: Acceleration, Ethics And The Spectacle
6. ‘That Balance’ And The New World Information Order
7. ‘Undertakings Of Great Advantage’
8. The (Re)Construction Of Reality: Local And Global Journalisms
Notes
Bibliography
Voir
Jim Hall provides a comprehensive guide to the emerging field of cyberjournalism and examines the issues it raises. Looking at how interactive texts are both written and read, the book surveys the new technologies and conventions that online journalism has ushered in. The author uses case studies such as Monicagate and the war in Kosovo to illustrate both the opportunities and the limitations of cyberjournalism.
It is designed as a text to introduce how cyberjournalism works and how it can be used in innovative ways.
Introduction
1. The Information Society
2. The Nature Of News
3. From Phototypesetting To Xml
4. Armageddon.Com: Homepages And Refugees
5. ‘Too Fresh To Be True’: Acceleration, Ethics And The Spectacle
6. ‘That Balance’ And The New World Information Order
7. ‘Undertakings Of Great Advantage’
8. The (Re)Construction Of Reality: Local And Global Journalisms
Notes
Bibliography
Publié par
Date de parution
20 février 2001
Nombre de lectures
1
EAN13
9781849645232
Langue
English
Poids de l'ouvrage
1 Mo
Online Journalism
A Critical Primer
Jim Hall
P Pluto Press LONDON • STERLING, VIRGINIA
First published 2001 by Pluto Press 345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA and 22883 Quicksilver Drive, Sterling, VA 20166–2012, USA
www.plutobooks.com
Copyright © Jim Hall 2001
The right of Jim Hall to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Hall, Jim, 1950– Online journalism : a critical primer / Jim Hall p. cm. Includes bibliographical references (p. ) ISBN 0-7453-1193-8 – ISBN 0-7453-1192-X (pbk.) 1. Electronic journals. I. Title. PN4833.H35 2001 025.06'0704–dc21 00-009184
ISBN ISBN
0 7453 1193 8 hardback 0 7453 1192 X paperback
10 09 08 07 06 05 04 03 02 01 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Disclaimer: Some images in the original version of this book are not available for inclusion in the eBook.
Designed and produced for Pluto Press by Chase Publishing Services, Fortescue, Sidmouth EX10 9QG Typeset from disk by Gawcott Typesetting Services Printed in the European Union by TJ International, Padstow, England
Contents
Introduction
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
The Information Society
The Nature of News
From Phototypesetting to XML
Armageddon.com: Home pages and Refugees
‘Too Fresh to Be True’: Acceleration, Ethics and the Spectacle
‘Undertakings of Great Advantage’
‘That Balance’ and the New World Information Order
The (Re)Construction of Reality: Local and Global Journalisms
Notes
Glossary
Bibliography
Index
1
13
41
64
94
128
158
185
209
231
247
254
260
For millennia, every attempt at civilization foundered because nations lacked the most essential information. Now we lurch forward, overburdened by hordes of misinformation. Sometimes I think our future existence will hang on whether we can keep false information from proliferating too rapidly. If our power to verify the facts does not keep pace, then distor-tions of information will eventually choke us. Norman Mailer Harlot’s Ghost London: Abacus, 1992, p. 249
Introduction
This book relates the story of news journalism’s encounter with the World Wide Web. It conspicuously avoids words such as ‘cyberspace’ and ‘virtuality’ and the arguments, which already look anachro-nistic, around their implicit techno-utopias and dystopias. The short history of the web has certainly seen enough utopian claims that corporate and political hierarchies could be tumbled by a technology they could no longer control and their power dispersed into every conceivable kind of community, and I have tried to reflect some of these. In contrast, the web is also the site of moves by media conglomerates vigorously gearing-up for global pre-eminence and a new kind of hegemony. The two trends do not entirely contradict each other. With regard to its determining effects on culture and society, the web itself remains neutral even while it becomes the conduit for new power configurations and relations predicated upon a new corporate ideology. The tendency of information technology is inherently conserva-tive rather than revolutionary; it cannot easily leapfrog its own technical and compatibility standards. The changes in journalism explored by this book, while closely associated with the Internet, are, accordingly, traced to other determinisms: the globalisation of ownership, the widespread deregulation of broadcast news media, entrepreneurial risk economies seeking private money and initia-tives, the mobilisation of new power relationships with the fall of the Iron Curtain and a whole spectrum of changes in social and cultural mores from reading habits to new routes to identity and subjectivity. The journalisms enabled by the web are driven by an agenda-setting
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radically different from the corporate and statal gatekeeping of the age of mass media, through which the information society is articu-lating the values that will premise its emerging institutions.
To engage in the process, we need a post-utopian imagination that embraces the complexity of human institutions and a critical technical practice that embraces the coevolution of institutions and technologies. Both the imagination and the practice can be 1 dimly seen taking form around us.
That imagination, while it is now renewing much of the social, cultural and economic, was earlier applied to the forms and practices of journalism as it explored the potential of Tim Berner-Lee’s inven-tion, the World Wide Web. By the beginning of the twenty-first century the web was serving around 200 million regular users with more than 800 million separate web pages. A publisher such as Reuters routinely served 27,000 pages of data every second of every day. The web continues to grow at an exponential rate and news, after email and search 2 engines, is one of the primary drivers for that growth. Web users access news through devices that range from small hand-held machines which are principally telephones using Wireless Application Protocol technologies (WAP) to adapted television sets and desktop computers connected to an array of peripherals that include cameras, printers and scanners. CNN’sCustomNewsservice is delivered through a mobile pager network. A potentially infinite number of channels is carried through this expanding array of tech-nologies. The web’s is a much larger constituency than those which deliv-ered earlier media audiences, even the continental audiences of satellite TV, and much more difficult to segment. For all its global range and its millions of users it refuses to fit neatly into the category of mass media. For media producers and the advertisers who under-write them new paradigms seeking junctions and commonalities of geography, age, gender, income, race and niche interests are required. How do they deliver news to an audience that is at once local and global? The interactive nature of the medium also demands new approaches and, for journalism, it has become clear that the tried and tested top-down forms, developed over the past three
Introduction
3
centuries around print, have been made obsolete by the new media and are increasingly irrelevant to the lives of many readers. There have even been suggestions that newspapers and magazines could be completely supplanted by Internet-based information delivery systems. It is salutary to enquire whether journalism itself is equally obsolete. As the technology takes over the role of mediation with software such as search engines and content filters, are the mediators still required? This book suggests that they are, but many traditional journalistic values such as objectivity, impartiality, accountability, balance, fairness and trustworthiness have, for old media, become ciphers and urgently need to be reviewed in the light of a new medium that trails with it all the confusions, opportunity and excite-ment of film one hundred years ago and printing at the time of Caxton. A textbook on online journalism rests on the assumption that the Internet is somehow different from other channels of news and information. It should try to span the positions of extreme techno-logical determinism, which underplays the cultural, ideological and economic contexts of the Internet, and the social constructivism which insists that technology is no more than an effect of the tectonic forces which move and shape those contexts. Current thinking in the media industries and in education, both in Europe and in North America, spans the full spectrum of views on the issue. While the opening sections of the book will introduce both the prac-tices and theories of journalism on the web it seems apposite to open with a consideration of some of those opinions. However we construe the relationship between the Internet and traditional news organisations what is now undeniable is that this relationship is important. The news media were the third global professional sector, after the military complex and higher education and research, to go online. In a period of some 18 months in the mid-1990s most national newspaper titles in the world and many regional and local titles produced web editions or went online to some extent. In some cases the transition radically affected the ways in which they produced news and, in the case of the American magazineOmnium, even allowed it to cease print publication for a period while it was restructured and yet apparently to retain the bulk of its circulation. One of the determining questions which I kept returning to as this
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Online Journalism
book developed asks whether online news is journalism as it has been understood historically merely repackaged or some radical emergent form. Can we understand it as journalism at all? Stephen Miller, assistant technology editor at theNew York Times, manages the training ofNew York Timesreporters and editors in new technologies and computer-assisted reporting. He believes that ‘… the Internet has fundamentally changed the news business’ and suggests that online technologies and readers offer reporters a new way of working.
… the opportunity to focus on information that you never got before. Suddenly you have a different brand of story, a more precise story. Suddenly there are better questions to ask. It’s a new starting place. It does not replace shoe leather and tradi-tional reporting … but it is a very powerful and very effective 3 technology.
The Internet adds momentum to trends that first appeared with the massification of media to expand further the constituency of jour-nalism. It becomes more than news-gathering, analysis and reportage. Journalism provides and structures the information that people need to understand themselves, to understand the world and to understand their place in the world. Such information extends beyond news; it includes ideas, stories and the dialogues in which readers can learn from each other. To look at journalism on the Internet only in the narrow context of what is traditionally consti-tuted as news, as merely another means of delivering information gathered elsewhere, is to imagine it too narrowly. Comparative studies of print editions and their online adjuncts find a much expanded remit for online newsrooms. InThe Universal JournalistDavid Randall suggests that the central role of the journalist is to ‘discover and publish information that 4 takes the place of rumour and speculation.’ Convention, developed over the past century and a half, dictates that such discoveries be published in specific narrative forms. The print journalist is effec-tively a storyteller and the nature of the story demands the series of filters and blind entries determined by the conventional structure of the ‘inverted pyramid’ if it is to attain its end. Increasingly the online journalist abjures that historic role to act as guide and commentator
Introduction
5
to primary sources – the discoveries themselves. As readers become their own storytellers the role of ‘gatekeeper’ is largely passed from the journalist to them. The move changes the nature of the story. The change is as momentous as those which took place during the period in which the press, capitalised by advertising, took over the role of information gatekeeper from those nation states which devel-oped into modern liberal democracies or from the church. Steve Case, the co-founder, chairman and chief executive officer of America Online (AOL), the largest subscriber Internet Service Provider (ISP), says that his organisation doesn’t even hire journalists because it views itself as a ‘news-packaging’ rather than a ‘news-gath-ering’ organisation. As we shall see, that distinction is crucial to the provision of news on the web. Yet when Diana, Princess of Wales, was killed in a car crash in Paris in 1997, AOL had more than 6 million visits to its front news page. The day after John F. Kennedy Jr’s fatal plane crash in July 1999 AOL’s consumers responded with 5 one message related to the event every second. That level of interest (bothMSNBCandFox Newsaudiences were up by more than 600 per cent over the previous weekend) seems to demand something more than ‘packaging’. In drawing the distinction between AOL, as a packager or aggre-gator of news, and traditional news outlets such as newspapers and magazines which report news, develop news sources and write stories, Case highlights one of the emerging roles of the online jour-nalist. While he explains why AOL does not hire journalists, he indicates that the online service does, however, employ individuals with ‘media backgrounds’ because it recognises that its product does require ‘sophisticated judgement’, as well as an in-depth knowledge of audience preferences and presentation options. Journalists in every country are currently using the Internet to rethink their roles as well as the social, political and commercial functions of news and information. That role is, to extend Case’s definition, much more than the optimum arrangement of text across a range of media. Reading the news is increasingly a fully interactive process and it is predicated upon a journalism that is capable of offering news as an array of sources and comment, in addition to a report or account, which is easily negotiated by many different kinds of readers. Such a shift demands in turn a reassessment of traditional ways of thinking about journalistic roles, practices and ethics.
