Review of Observer feature.

Hanging my head in shame for the lazy souls of the Observer online.

Unfortunately for me, this article is exactly what’s wrong with online journalism, and in my opinion showed the lack of true online journalism.

The story itself was a brilliantly written for the Observer, it looked at the widely popular Grazia magazine and how the BBC has decided to make a fly on the wall documentary about the magazine. The style was up beat, making little jibes at its lack of professionalism and schoolgirl attitudes, but overall praised its success in finding the gap in the market.

This did nothing to impart faith in the growth of online journalism; this was a simple edit job from print to online.

For one it was far too long and completely un-readable for a long space of time, the text was too small and there wasn't sufficient spacing between the texts that made it feel very cramped.
There were also no visuals to rest the eye from text; it was block text from start to finish, which made it rather boring to read. Some pictures of the interviewees would have enhanced the story.

It also made no use of a roll over or hyper linking to any sites, this made it a rather dull story which could easily have been 'jazzed up' with links to other sites, possibly the BBC site and Grazia itself; a multi media element could have been used by showing a clip of the new documentary (if available).

I found this a very disappointing example of an online feature, there was no use of the many facets of the Internet, and had not been changed to fit the short snappy style of good Internet journalism.

Good to be back. Web retrospective

Review of Nora Paul's look at the promises of the Internet a decade after.

While some of the promises made by Internet trailblazers still exist today, Nora Paul gives insight into the false promises made 10 years ago.

The internet is still a limitless news hole with much space for in-depth new reporting, unfortunately it is not used for this capacity; as now we understand the limitations for reading text on screen, and how we process news has changed to a more brief overview of news. .

Hyper linking is still a valuable asset of the online function; it opens a story to many more interpretations and more in-depth reading on other sites. This is not as common on typical news websites such as The Times online, as it moves readers away from the page and therefore removes focus away from the news page.

While I would agree that there is a varied style of news reporting, this generally comes from un-quantified sources making it less trustworthy and more unlikely to be read.

A great example of the better follow up on news stories would be to look at the Madeline McCann story online, such websites as The Sun and The Mirror give a constant flow of news on this continuing story.

I think the greatest aid to the online news-reporting element is multi media; stories such as the Virginia Tech shootings and Saddam Hussein’s hanging were enhanced by video footage. By reading a story like the examples I gave, and then having the opportunity to hear or see footage gives a greater dimension to a story and there fore makes it more interesting.

Nora Paul makes good points about the limitations of the Internet, but she fails to comment on the consumers change in acquiring news. She touches on the 'time starved but news hungry consumer' but fails to mention that the internet has given us options on where to read our news; we are now our own gatekeepers of news, we can pick and choose which and where news to read, unlike generations before us we can choose which news to read.

Paul's piece is also limited in its idea of 'news', I believe that news is no longer just current affairs but it falls into many categories from celebrities to finance. We use blogs, forums and other modes of the Internet to get niche and specific news that would never be offered in a conventional newspaper.