Strengths and Weaknesses

With all of the hype surrounding the web and more importantly the rapid popularity of online journalism, it is easy to overlook the negative effects it has on society as a whole.

The "global village" has become hooked on what some could call a gigantic marketing scheme. The Web is basically another form of advertising, especially for large corporations. Log on to any Web site and you are sure to find numerous ads promoting the latest trend in Hollywood or the newest miracle diet. But that is how money is made in the Web industry.

Some would argue there is too much information on the Web. Type anything into a search engine and you are guaranteed hundreds, if not thousands, of results. Not all of these results are actually related to your search query. For a reader looking for a specific piece of news or a site on a specific topic (i.e. cancer), they could be bombarded with hundreds of sites to search for related information.

For example, the popular Google search engine searches 3,083,324,652 web pages when a query is typed into the search engine field. Log onto Google (http://www.google.com) and type in the subject word 'cancer', how many results did you receive? As of November 20, 2002 the Google search engine returned approximately 14,900,000 related sites for readers to search in approximately 0.17 seconds. Numbers as high as these could be overwhelming for first time users, even long time professionals. But numbers like these show just how infinite the World Wide Web actually is.

Another weakness in online journalism is the stigma attached to e-journalists. The term 'shovel-up' is one widely used term in the online journalism industry. Shovel-up is when e-journalists take information already published in print, radio or television and publish it for the web. Granted, all newspapers that have an online version of their paper do publish the same stories (how else would online readers get the same information as print readers?), but there is a myth among online journalism skeptics that that is all an e-journalist does.

Online journalism is exactly that, journalism to be published and seen online. Original material by e-journalists provide a new and refreshing way for the same story told all over the world to be heard in a different way; this is where interactivity comes into play.

Where there are weaknesses there are always strengths and the same holds true for online journalism. It is fast, easy to use and best of all, it is generally a free service. All anyone will need is a computer, an Internet Service Provider , a browser and all of the news you want to keep up with is yours. Whether you want to know the weather in Japan or the headline news coming out of Ireland, it is all there at your fingertips.online vs traditional...