Some Concluding Words Pt.1
This is the end of our trip through the world on News Online. I hope you enjoyed reading my articles as much as I enjoyed doing my research and writing the articles. Let’s take a look at what we learnt from each of them:
Did the XXI Century Even Happen?
In this article I was arguing that in order to be successful in the online world, publications need to learn to adapt to the requirements of that world.
While the experience of reading news on the computer screen is not very pleasurable per se, newspapers need to come out of their way to provide an additional advantage.
This can be done by making sure that the archive is well functioning and that the needed information is easy to find. Another option is enabling downloads, as the music magazine Gramophone does. Providing easy to use share tools can both make the visit more pleasurable, as well as increase the possibility of greater exposure on the Net. To achieve the latter, the New York Times collaborated with Google Earth to simplify the process of finding geographically-organized news. In the article I also discussed the idea of Adrian Holovaty who suggested using XML tags to ease the process of reading the news.
All in all, the lesson was that it is not enough to simply provide the same articles on the website and in the print version. Newsrooms need to take advantage of the new platform they are using if they want to be popular among their readers (and in result, among advertisers).
The beginnings of News Online were rather tough. If we go all the way back to the times of teletext and videotex, it’s amazing to see how much the technology available to us has changed. While teletext is still used nowadays (although rather rarely for the purposes of accessing news), videotex was a failure and made investors lose a lot of money.
The next step was the World Wide Web which has greatly developed since its beginnings. While Web 1.0 was mostly non-participatory, Web 2.0 invites the readers to get involved with the online platform. Newsrooms should learn to appreciate those possibilities and welcome their readers to engage in the process of creating news. This could be done by encouraging feedback (email or comment options), and even promoting sending own suggestions for news or pictures to illustrate the professional stories.
While it is unknown how the future of News Online will look like, we can try to speculate about the possibilities. My ideas include the ultimate participation of Web 3.0, e.g. by the use of Second Life or other platforms by newsrooms; the other possibility envisioned by me is the end of the print format and the ultimate existence solely on the Web.
