What is Online Journalism and it's advantages and disadvantages.

 What is Online Journalism and it's advantages and disadvantages.                                    

Online Journalism?

Multimedia journalism involves the use of text, images, sound, video clips, graphics to tell stories in an engaging way. Professionals who work in multimedia journalism leverage digital tools and social media platforms to share their stories with a particular audience online. The purpose of these stories is to inform, educate or entertain that specific audience.

Multimedia journalism also requires using research skills to find newsworthy stories and to learn more about niche markets. Once their stories have been live for some time, multimedia journalists use analysis skills and tools to measure their content’s success.

Digital journalism also known as online journalism is a contemporary form of journalism where editorial content is distributed via the Internet as opposed to publishing via print or broadcast.

Online journalism is a process that has been in use for the past years by newspapers industries,journalist report facts produced and distributed through the INTERNET. It has been noticed that people no longer buy the printed out newspapers except they want to keep it for reference purposes but the internet users sees it has a readily available and less costly network

The advantages of online journalism are given below:

1.    Cost-effective: The cost of publishing online is affordable compared to the huge financial commitments involved in setting up a conventional newspaper house, including daily publication costs and staff salaries.

2.    Convergence of roles: The roles of a reporter and an editor are blurred as one person can perform such duties and others as computer typesetting.

3.    Fast and convenient: Publishing online is both fast and convenient. You post news updates at the click of a button without stress.

4.    Checks waste: The loss of resources arising from unsold copies of newspapers is prevented.

5.    Quick feedback: The feedback mechanism in online journalism is better and faster, as against the Letter to the Editor section of a mainstream newspaper. Admins can almost immediately respond to comments and feel the pulse of their visitors.

6.    Humanness: The audience can feel the human ‘presence’ behind an online publication because of the interaction possible at both ends.

Disadvantages of online Journalism:

1.    Just because the article is online, it doesn’t mean it is no longer biased. Most media is biased – views expressed are almost always one sided.

2.    With more and more news outlets putting a greater focus on providing online news services, this could result in a cut in jobs, as to operate on the internet, fewer personnel are required.

3.    Websites could crash if lots of people try accessing them for a major news story; if the site crashes, nobody can access it for a short while.

4.    Some technical issues regarding the website could occur, resulting in the website having to go offline temporarily. This will ultimately mean that people will not be able to access the website, and so could turn to competitors of the offline news site.