Nora Paul's 'New News' retrospective

Nora Paul's piece is an interesting review of what was expected of online news production, and what has actually been delivered.

For the most part, I follow what she says, and agree with the analysis. However, I also agree with one of her commentors, that she overlooks solely online based publications. These publications are more geared towards exploring the online forum, and tend to take advantage of the online potential. The reason for this is obvious, in that they cannot fall back on a corresponding print publication, and so have to use the online forum to the best potential in order to succeed. This is especially important as online news publications face the challenge of raising money to sustain the publication.

Money becomes an important issue for online publications. The challenge faced by the online publishers is to make the publication good enough to either make people accept a small fee to view the content, or attract advertisers.

However, following the point regarding Nora Paul's lack of solely online based publications analysis, I feel it is poor to make some of the wide generalisations that she does. She says that online news publications 'haven't done this', or 'haven't done that', yet some have, and the web is so large that I think it is impossible to make any generalisations. Finding the publications that have lived up to the potential is the real challenge.


Overall, I agree with Nora Paul. Online publications currently are not living up to their potential. However, I think this may change as print circulation figures are continuing to drop and the online news forum becomes more important. Furthermore, though online publications aren't achieving what was suggested, it has to be considered that what was suggested as online publications' potential was inaccurate.

The best example of this is the suggestion that online publications can have so much more content that would otherwise be edited out. In reality, people don't always want this content, or to read through the now increased size of the article. The point of online news isn't necessarily the unlimited 'newshole', but may in fact be ease of retrieval and its immediacy. Again, this doesn't mean that online publications haven't lived up to potential, but that what was considered the potential was not necessarily what was best for it.

Additionally, it comes back to money, and until online becomes a more dominant media form and is financed as well as it could be, it will never achieve its potential.

Online Features

When print media sources try to access the potential of the online forum, they often tend to do a straightforward 're-print'. The material they use is the same, it's just online. This is usually the case with TV News channels when displaying stories on their corresponding website. This is also usually the case with print publications, especially magazines and newspapers.


An example of this is Wired's online article 'An IM Infatuation Turned to Romance. Then The Truth Came Out.'

The article was published in the magazine as well as online, and in terms of written content, they're identical.

However, Wired have attempted to take advantage of the online domain by adding extra content that would otherwise take up too much space in the magazine. Specifically, they've added an IM conversation between the piece's subjects. This is very long, and would otherwise consume several pages in the magazine. It's not an essential piece of content, but online it can be shown and rounds off the piece slightly.

Additionally, Wired have incorporated some links to give the piece more life and make it more full and complete.


Without having seen the magazine version, the online re-print works. It doesn't come across as a re-print or cluttered. It works independently and as a separate entity, not reliant on the magazine format.