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!
