Week 5, Meikle A+B

The ‘online news environment’ is an advancement to the existing news shown in print and on television. The news reports need to be written in a style that can reach and be of interest to a large population, ‘the news reports need to be saleable in a market unconstrained by geography’. The communicational opportunities the internet brings means that people can easily find out news on sites which is meant to affect them. Online news is meant to be easily accessible and informative to people all over the world. However, this idea raises questions about whether news in say America or Germany would interest people in England or France. It also questions what point of view these reports will be from, if a report needs to be written about a controversial subject e.g. the Iraq War, whose point of view will it be from? Everybody has different opinions about the intentions of the countries involved so how could a news report take all of these views into consideration and make it appeal to people in different countries across the world? This criticises the above quote from the Meikle reading about news reports needing to be unconstrained by geography. The ability to communicate on the internet has meant that the power has shifted, the audience are no longer the passive audience who just receive messages, and they can also contribute. Indymeida is an example of how ordinary people with no journalism experience can supply information and ideas. This mirrors the ideas that have been given in previous weeks about the freedom and opportunities the internet allows such as Lister’s idea that the users are able to ‘build on’ ideas that are on internet and Turkle’s idea that they have freedom to give their own opinion. To criticise this point though you could argue that would people look at the Intymedia website for news, or would they go straight to the BBC or CNN because these are credible online news sources? I suppose it depends on whether people think that having journalism skills means that the reporter can write the story in a way that will grasp the audience’s attention and they may have more connections which enable them to have better sources, or would the audience prefer to read information from people similar to them, who have little agendas because it isn’t their work?

UPDATE: I found a journal on http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/893/802 and Deuze discusses online journalism online. In the diagram Mode 1 ( a couple of pages down in the journal) he discusses the difference between online new sources and the participatory content, public contectivity and editorial content! This diagram shows a hierarchy of online new sources and how different types of online journalism is being used. Deuze also states that 'Research at the BBC in Great Britain also revealed the unrest new media technologies have created in the newsroom; journalists reported lack of time to adequately use and master the technology, feeling stressed because of the 'immediate' nature of the Internet (Cottle, 1999). This statement shows how saturated the internet news is because of everybodies ability to become journalist. This rushed nature of the internet could question the authencities of the stories online, and question whether the story content is quality, or produced solely on the fact that the journalists are under pressure from competition!