Lecture 5

Hi! What a week it’s been! I’ve been thinking long and hard all week about this online artefact that I will be creating for my project in this module. Whilst thinking about the process I would go through to create it I couldn’t help but wonder, in order to complete the tasks requirement, I must be able to define what the difference is between publishing something online compared to publishing something as a hard copy, and what are the advantages or disadvantages to publishing something online?

Publishing something allows you to print any type of work, whether it is an article, journal or book. But these days, the publishing world has now advanced and evolved with technology. This disruptive technology has now made it possible to publish these types of works online in this day and age. For example, online newspaper websites such as-
• ‘TheSun’(http://thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/)
• ‘Guardian’ (http://guardian.co.uk/)
and
• ‘The Times’ (http://timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/).

This means that the public no longer have to buy a newspaper or watch the news in order to be up to date with current affairs. All they have to do is sit in the comfort of their own homes and browse the web to be clued up on the world’s news. They don’t even have to buy journals anymore. All they have to do is go online to websites such as archipelago (http://www.archipelago.org/), and browse to view collections of people’s works that they have submitted to be a part of an online journal such as poems or pieces of creative writing. You can even submit your own work to be published as a part of a journal if you wish to do so.

Have you ever thought of comparing the traditional newspaper article with an online article and seeing how different they've become through technological advances? Take a look at the following online article-

http://www.news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/8325096.stm
Ten years ago this story would be reported on the news (television) or in a newspaper where it would only be a word article in the editorial section. Nowadays stories are published online with added technological advances. Therefore I've been analysing the advantages, as well as the disadvantages that an online article offers its readers as opposed to a normal hard copy article.

One of the advantages to reading an article online is that the readers have extra features that enhance their interest and pleasure in the story. Take hypertext as an example of one of these technological advances. Are you familiar with this? If not, have you noticed links at the side of the page when reading an online article? These allow the reader to view summaries of the story, background information on the subject, as well as the option to browse other similar stories online. This adds another dimension to the publishing world as readers can research more about the subject, and get different perspectives on the story rather than just one view point on the matter, as the work is created by multiple authors with different opinions on the subject. Through doing this, the reader can delve deeper in to the story/article that was printed, and have the option of sharing(e-mailing) these stories with others if they think that it might be of interest to other individuals.

Newspaper articles usually include photographs to keep the reader’s interest in the story. But online publishing goes that one step further as it is possible to add video and audio links to the article. This allows the reader/viewer to get a different take on the article to what they would get just by reading the story alone. This is an effective form of communicating with the audience, as it can add more emotion to the story as the audience can see those affected by what happened. Another advantage to publishing articles online is that it is a quicker form of releasing breaking news to the public. The reason for this is that it is possible to update online articles 24hours a day, whereas if a newspaper has printed an article on a certain story, and has new facts to add to the story, they must wait until the following day to print a follow up on that particular story as newspapers are only printed daily. With online articles you can put the story straight up on the World Wide Web without getting conformation or corroboration of certain facts, as you can edit this as soon as you do. This allows the story to be broken first on the web usually. If you wait to check your facts, you’re going to lose the story to someone else. This same notion of time/the web being a quicker source of information on current affairs applies to the audience commenting on different articles. For example, it is possible for readers to comment on an online article straight away, where as with a newspaper article it could take weeks for the reader’s comments to be published, and even then it’s only about three different comments that are chosen to be published out of hundreds. Usually by then the article is old news to people! This Washington Post’s article is a great example where readers have commented on articles-
http://washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/09/15/AR2008091503124_Comments.html
Why not take a look!

Where there are advantages to online articles, there are also disadvantages to them. One of these disadvantages is that the gatekeeper doesn’t have as much power with this outlet as they do with newspaper articles when it comes to controlling what people comment. Therefore the story isn’t necessarily depicted in the way that they had hoped for, as other members of the public read these comments online and change their views/ stance on the story. Another downside to online articles is that sometimes people click on the hyperlinks that appear on the side od the article, and click on to another link on that page, repeating this action. It’s hard then to get back to the original page as they’ve gone from one page to another, then another a.s.o.

As I have iterated above, video and audio links do have advantages linked to them when it comes to an online article, but they can also prevent the audience from getting the true story as they edit the story down to a few seconds compared to how it would be portrayed in a full length story on the news (television). This is the same with an article piece. It is cut down in word amount compared to some newspaper articles; therefore the public do not get a fair representation of what truly happened. An example of this would be how the media take certain quotes out of context and put a different spin on them in order to sell newspapers. This also is relevant to online articles as they are competing against other websites in order to get higher ratings for their articles. By clicking the stumble upon button on an online article (which is usually located at the bottom of the page), the higher the rating of that certain article goes. This means that if that article receives the largest amount of clicks that day, it would be the top story of the day. Does this mean that by doing this we as an audience are becoming a part of creating the news? I suppose in a way it does. Think about it, if people don’t take an interest in that particular article, it’s not news!

Leave your comments on the matter.