When a big news story breaks in a print format there is only one way to cover the story: send your best writer to find out what is going on, write a piece, and if there are time and resources available, take pictures. When a big news story breaks in an online format there are endless ways to cover the story. Deuze (2004) explains multimedia journalism in two ways:
first as the presentation of a news story package on a website using two or more media formats, such as (but not limited to) spoken and written word, music, moving and still images, graphic animations, including interactive and hypertextual elements: secondly, as the integrated (although not necessarily simultaneous) presentation of a news story package through different media, such as (but not limited to) a website, a Usenet newsgroup, e-mail, SMS, MMS, radio, television, print newspapers and magazines (2004:140).
To put it in simpler terms: the way a story is covered and how it is distributed has an exponential multimedia potential online.
Indeed as broadband access continues to increase (Pew Internet & American Life Project 2006) and news websites continue to embrace the technology
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(Hirschman 2007) these forms of multimedia journalism will only increase. Already if you survey most of the largest mainstream news websites10 you can see all forms of media being used. Many of these parentage sites have a great advantage technologically speaking as they have more financial resources to acquire technology and human resources to execute these many forms of multimedia. However, money does not necessarily guarantee successful
application of multimedia on the Web. Some of the most innovative users of the webs multimedia are net native newssites or even niche content sites (Deuze et.al 2007).
One of the most heralded examples of using Web technologies to its fullest extent is Glam.com. The website was originally a niche fashion site that then decided to utilize a network of knowledgeable players to branch out and create an entire women‘s network. According to the site:
Glam Media leverages the increasing fragmentation of the Internet —bringing together owned-and-operated websites, including flagship Glam.com, with the Glam Publisher Network of more than 400 popular lifestyle websites and blogs and syndicated content from leading media companies. Glam Media‘s distributed media network model effectively bridges hundreds of unique digital ―voices‖ representing the best content in each category relevant to women.‘11
The site has been praised by new media enthusiast Jeff Jarvis in his blog Buzz Machine. Jarvis says:
10 http://www.bbcnews.com or http://www.cnn.com
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So Glam is a content network. But they don‘t create all the content. They curate it. So we should curate more as we create less. That‘s another way to say what I‘ve said other ways: Do what we do best and link to the rest. Also: We need to gather more and produce less, so we also need to encourage others to produce more so we can gather it (2007).
The biggest critique of mainstream news sites (particularly parentage sites owned by large media corporations) is their lack of embracing Web 2.0, which is what sites such as Glam.com have done best. This term is thrown around a lot but essentially is:
Given to describe a second generation of the World Wide Web that is focused on the ability for people to collaborate and share information online. Web 2.0 basically refers to the transition from static HTML Web pages to a more dynamic Web that is more organized and is based on serving Web applications to users. Blogs, wikis, and Web services are all seen as components of Web 2.0 (Internet.com 2009).
Most websites, as mentioned above, are beginning to embrace all that the Web has to offer but there is some scepticism, largely to do with the perceived lack of money making attached to participatory journalism and media (Project for Excellence in Journalism 2007). However, as more people head to the Web every year for news across the globe and as broadband technology catches up this scepticism will surely be misplaced with ways to take advantage of these new media platforms.
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In analysing the newest studies of online journalism the technology of the medium becomes a central issue for how the journalists do their work (Deuze and Dimoudi 2002, Wilson 2008, Chung 2007). Online journalists in these studies are framing much more of what they do around the technology that is available to them to create different types of journalism and tell stories in much different ways. This focus led many converged newsrooms to create a Web first, print/broadcast second rule (Wilby 2006, Sessions Step 2007, Ahrens 2006). It was also concluded, in converged newsroom, that there was a struggle between the old and new mediums (Boczkowski 2004, Singer 2004, Ahrens 2006, Sessions Stepp 2007).
There is no consensus within much of these studies about whether this
proliferation of technology available in the online medium is a good thing or bad thing (Quandt et. al. 2006, Wilson 2008, MacGregor 2007, Chung 2007). Those involved in the creation of online journalism particularly in the study of United States newspaper parentage websites were quite sceptical about the changes but many were also optimistic about the potential they might bring.