Online Journalism

Principles and Practices of News for the Web

Jim Foust

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351816021
• Edition: 3
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Journalism
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

The third edition of Online Journalism builds on the foundations of journalism to clearly show how they can be integrated into online environments. It takes the perspective that web content shouldn't be a separate component or an afterthought but instead is a vital part of story creation. From doing research to creating the web space, to posting and getting stories into the hands of users, this useful resource gives students the tools they need. Online Journalism readies readers for wherever their news careers take them, whether it's to the online portion of legacy news organizations, to online-only startups, or to blogs, news apps and beyond.

Key features include a companion website, practical activities at the end of each chapter, screenshots illustrating key concepts and a Glossary.

1
Introduction to Online Journalism

• To introduce you to the practice of online journalism

• To discuss the advantages of online media for practicing journalism

• To discuss the basic types of online journalism sites

• To provide basic criteria for evaluating online journalism sites

• To discuss the economic challenges facing journalism and how these challenges affect online journalism

• To outline the organization of this book

The Internet has been called the greatest advance for communication since the invention of the printing press. It is estimated that approximately two billion people around the world use the Internet, and that number continues to grow.

Acquiring news and information is a major part of what people do on the Internet, and online journalism sites have played an important role in the Internet’s growth. So-called legacy organizations—those associated with pre-Internet media such as newspapers, magazines, television and radio—have driven the growth of online news up to now, but independent and startup organizations are playing an increasing role as well. The struggles of the legacy journalistic organizations have been well-documented, with mass layoffs, buy-outs and even the shuttering of newspapers becoming something of a regular occurrence. For aspiring journalists, this means that it is more likely than ever that you will not spend your career working for a traditional, legacy news organization. Instead, at some point—and perhaps from the beginning of your career—you may need to be an entrepreneur, establishing your own business or becoming a partner in a small startup-type organization. At the very least, it is likely that at some point in your career you will do journalistic work for an organization that didn’t even exist in the year you graduated high school.

With these changes, the future of online news offers a wealth of vibrant opportunities. It can give readers—whom we often call users online—new forms of news and information at all hours of the day and night and no matter where they are. In addition to traditional websites, news organizations create content for mobile devices such as smartphones and even for “living-room” devices such as televisions, video game consoles, and Blu-ray players. Through geolocation technology— contained in an increasing number of mobile phones and other devices—content can be tailored to the user’s current location. We can even send users information automatically, without them having to do anything. For example, if you are carrying your mobile phone while stuck in a traffic jam, a news organization might send you information about what’s causing the jam and offer ideas for an alternate route. Better yet, you might receive the information about the impending back-up before you get stuck in it.

In addition, online news organizations are connecting with their audience in ever-more personalized ways, even making the audience a part of the journalistic process. Through increased involvement with social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook, online news organizations are engaging in conversations with users. For instance, when users log in to Facebook to see what their friends are up to, they can also receive updates from their favorite news organizations. Thus tools such as social media, by allowing members of the audience to participate in the journalistic process, make the delivery of news less of a top-down process and more of an actual conversation. The concept of citizen journalism, in which journalistic content is actually produced by members of the audience, is one outcome of this kind of two-way communication.

It is truly a new journalistic world. News organizations are changing, becoming smaller and more diverse; news content is changing, becoming in some cases more informational than investigative; media forms are changing, becoming more interactive and wide-ranging; the audience is changing, accessing content from many different devices and locations at all times of the day; and the relationship between the audience and news organizations is changing, becoming more like a conversation among equals than a lecture.

This book is designed to prepare you to be an online journalist in this rapidly changing environment. It assumes that you have already learned the basic theories and practices of journalism and that you are now ready to apply them to online media. The book will review some of those theories and practices—and in many ways expand on them—as it examines the technical issues involved in creating online content and shows you ways to maximize the Internet as a tool for journalism. Technical issues, such as bits, bytes and servers, are a part of the book, as are technical processes, such as writing computer code and downloading files, but they are only apart of the book. The real goal is to teach you enough about these issues and processes that you can apply them to producing good journalism.

The book is intentionally broad-based: In today’s volatile online environment, it is nearly impossible to describe a “typical” online journalist, or to know if there even is such a thing. How do we compare, for example, a production specialist who works as part of a 10-person team at a large newspaper site to the television reporter at a small-town TV station who is also solely responsible for producing the news portion of the station’s website? The general conclusion is that they are both practicing journalism, even though it may be difficult to find many commonalities in their day-to-day jobs. For that reason, this book seeks to expose the reader to multiple types of online journalism, practiced in many different settings. Whatever your vision of online journalism or your aspirations for a career in the field may be, this book and its accompanying website (see “To the Student” on page xvi) are intended to provide you with a starting point.

WHAT IS JOURNALISM?

Before we look at online journalism, we should first remind ourselves of some of the attributes of journalism in general. Although there are many kinds of journalism, practiced by many different kinds of people in many different places and for many types of media, some common threads connect—or at least should connect—all journalists.

The early-20th-century journalist Finley Peter Dunne said that the purpose of journalism was “to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.” At its best, journalism can expose inequities and injustices that affect those without money or power, or it can uncover the corruption or other wrongdoing of governments and corporations. In some cases, it can even do both at the same time. Fearless and thorough journalism has toppled presidents, helped to end racially discriminatory practices and warned the public about potentially dangerous automobiles, medicines and other products.

Yet journalism that does not pursue such lofty goals can still be valuable and effective. For a democracy to function properly, citizens need to be informed about the day-to-day and continuing issues that influence them. People want to know about the things that affect—or will affect—their lives financially, socially and in other ways. Thus, journalism that addresses school vouchers, real estate tax hearings or city council meetings serves an important purpose. To a lesser degree, entertainment or sports journalism also has value, at least in terms of providing the audience with something it desires. Finally, merely providing information can be an important part of what news organizations do for their audience in the online world. People want to know about traffic jams, weather changes and local school schedules, and news organizations are often uniquely positioned to provide this information.

Journalists are essentially information gatherers: They get information, process it and then present it in an appropriate form. However, the same could be said of many other professionals, including lawyers, advertising copywriters and stock analysts. What, then, makes journalists unique? Several traits distinguish journalists from these other professionals and, indeed, from other types of writers; the same traits separate online journalism websites from other types of websites.

Fairness

The core trait of journalism is fairness, meaning that journalists approach information without bias and report it in the same manner. If an issue has two sides, they report both of them; if it has more than two sides, they report all of them. A journalist’s job is not to further someone else’s point of view or to do the bidding of a particular interest, but to remain independent. The old phrase “just the facts, ma’am” aptly summarizes a journalist’s responsibility to avoid injecting his or her own point of view into a story or allowing someone else’s point of view to dominate the story.

The concept of fairness is not so cut-and-dried, however. For years, conservatives have decried journalism’s “liberal bias,” while those on the left have countered that the corporate media’s bias is in fact to the right. Though it is well beyond the scope of this book to settle that dispute, we know that certain journalistic organizations approach the news from either the left or the right. Still, ideally these organizations should at least make an attempt to be sure “the other side” is heard as well.

Traditionally, the only significant exception to the journalist’s fairness credo had been reserved for opinion columnists and reviewers who, it was expected, would be providing their opinions in their work. The Internet has given rise to other possible exceptions, most notably for journalists who contribute to blogs. As will be discussed later in this chapter and in Chapter 2, blogs operate within a more informal, free-flowing model than do tradition...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• About the Author
• To the Student
• 1 Introduction to Online Journalism
• 2 Online Journalism Structures
• 3 The Audience: Involved and In Motion
• 4 Tools and Terminology
• 5 Using Online Reporting Sources
• 6 Creating and Managing Web Content
• 7 Web Page Design
• 8 Writing and Editing Online
• 9 Using Links in Online Stories
• 10 Using Multimedia, Mashups and APIs
• 11 Gathering and Editing Images, Audio and Video
• 12 Legal and Ethical Issues
• Appendix
• Glossary
• Index