"Yet there are still newspaper web sites that state 'This page will be updated every day at 2 pm.' It is a contradition of the medium." -Online Journalism, Mike Ward
Online newspapers scream to be updated. If a site is really a news site, then it needs to be refreshed whenever news happens -- not just once every day.
Even with 24-hour news channels don't give you the same type of information that online news services do. For example, I turned my TV on one night, and there was a major event going on, with interrupted programming. I watched the TV for a few seconds, but all it did was show me darkness, which was presumably the New York skyline. I had no clue what was going on. Clearly, I went online and immediately read the headline on nytimes.com that said something like "East Coast blackout not terrorism related." I kept the TV on and finally they got around to alluding to the same thing, while interviewing a bunch of "experts" who said what amounted to nothing.
In that way, online journalism is almost vital now. As a news consumer, I'm sick of waiting to see what 15 second blurb will be coming up after the commercial break. If I want to see it, I will -- just somewhere on the Internet.
Posted by Julie Young at September 27, 2003 07:07 PMAmen, Julie. I see plenty of online newsletters and journals that hold their articles for months, just so they can coincide with the release of an printed issue. For a magazine, a collection of short stories, or a group of articles on a similar subject, I think it does make sense to release all the material at once. But when I worked for a radio news station, every hour was a deadline (and, during rush hour, every half hour, too).
No, we never had time for depth, but we were able to cover far more news, at greater depth, than the local TV stations (who had far less news time than we did, since most local TV news is taken up with advertising, a ridiculously long weather segment, hosts chatting with each other, and footage supplied by networks or files).
The Internet permits both speed and depth.
Posted by: Dennis G. Jerz at September 28, 2003 01:18 PM