Who is whom and what is what?

Welcome to my site about News Online. It is the final product of my Bachelor education – the Capstone (or Bachelor thesis) project.

Me

My name is Hania Piotrowska and for the last three years I have been undertaking undergraduate studies at the University College Maastricht in the Netherlands. The focus of my programme is Media Studies and Marketing, therefore I tried to choose a topic which would enable me to fully reflect on what I have learnt during this time. In result my entries combine those two perspectives.

Topic

Let me now explain to you what I mean by news online – after all, this topic might seem bottomless. Therefore I decided to focus mainly on newspapers and magazines going online. Platforms like the Drudge Report (a private website created by someone who by no means is a professional journalist) or Fox News (website related to a TV station) are excluded from my discussion.

You will come across such titles as the New York Times, Guardian and Times while reading different articles. The idea was to analyze the situation in which a certain publication has a print version and starts (or already had started) an online version on top of that. The discussion tackles the challenges and benefits related to such a dual existence.

Newspapers and magazines are treated in the same way by me. This is to say that when you read “newspaper” you can feel free to generalise it to “newspaper and/or magazine”. I was trying to use both terms simultaneously to avoid confusion. The bottom line is the fact that by “magazines” I mean the type of publications which deal with verifiable information (news) rather than gossips. The only exception to this case is the article “Macca vs. Paul McCartney” which mentions the British tabloid The Sun often. The focus here is the use of search engines and differences between broadsheets and tabloids.

Occasionally it will happen that I discuss a platform which has no print version. This is the case of Crossroads, which is solely an online magazine. The interesting thing about it is the fact that Crossroads used to have a print version and was forced to drop it due to financial problems. Reuters is mentioned as well, but I guess we can all agree that this source is trustworthy enough to be included in the discussion. The general red threat, however, is to discuss publications which have both a print and an online version.

Format

The first idea was to create a print magazine – I really wanted to spend time editing the articles in InDesign and creating a professional layout. However, as my research into the topic of news online developed, I realized that such a format would be counterproductive. As you will see, throughout the articles I argue mostly that the shift to the online world is a very positive process. Therefore I decided to live up to my argumentation and to take my Capstone to another level – an online level.

Articles

Below you can find a short summary of each article with a link which will take you directly to the full version. You can also access the full versions by clicking on the links in the “Pages” section in the right corner of the screen. I hope you will enjoy reading!

Did the XXI Century Even Happen?

This article deals with the issues a publication has to face when it decides to create a website. I argue that nowadays it is not enough to simply post online the same articles which were printed in the paper version.

Web 2.0 provides editors and journalists with tools which they can use to involve the readers in the whole process and to interact better with them. The options available are countless and don’t have to be very expensive. One interesting example comes from the Guardian which enabled its staff members to create own weblogs in order to improve the relations between them and the readers.

Other examples discussed in the article include creating well-functioning archives, using share tools, enabling downloads and collaborating with others to increase coverage. For the dessert I left a very interesting suggestion made by Adrian Holovaty: using smart XML tags in order to simplify the experience of reading the online news. It’s all about functionality but also about the experience of reading: both need to be maximized in order to improve our satisfaction from accessing the publications.

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Blast from the Past

This article deals with the historical developments in the field of Online News. While most people think that online news only started with the Internet boom, I show the rather unknown beginnings – going all the way back to teletext and videotex. The developments related to the World Wide Web (Web 1.0 and 2.0) will also be discussed. I will also try to envision the possible future of online news. You are of course very welcome to share your ideas about how the field might develop at the next stage.

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Macca vs. Paul McCartney

In this article I will introduce you to the argument of Will Cooper who claims that tabloids might be worse-off than broadsheets when it comes to being easily found by search engines. He writes that the disadvantage is created due to using nicknames instead of legal names in such articles.

To argue that the case is not as harsh as Coopers suggests, I will first analyse the way tabloids refer to celebrities in their articles and later explain how Internet search works (based on the example of Google). While I admit that there is some truth to what he says, I argue that the situation is much less serious.

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Interview with an Online Editor

Sueli Brodin, the editor of Crossroads, shares some very interesting experiences of being involved with a magazine which started as a print publication but due to financial constrains was forced to move fully to the virtual world. Interestingly, it seems that this shift has increased the magazine’s publicity and enabled the creator to monitor it easily. We talk about challenges, benefits, Web 2.0 and the possibility of disappearance of the print format all-together.

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Concluding words

To read conclusions to each of the articles and to get to know about my plans for the future click here