This chapter looks at the net as a medium of communication for the mass media, that is, online journalism. The online news media offered little more than written text and pictures at the initial stage, but numerous sites currently offer audio and video content, including streamed and real-time signals. Examples of Indian sites of this type are those of Doordarshan and NDTV (for a fee).

Globally, there are a large number of such sites, especially ‘web radio’ channels, which can be found through indexes like web-radio.fm (http://www.web-radio.fm/fr_list.cfm). However, it is virtually impossible to receive these streams properly with the slow dial-up internet connections that are still extensively used in India. Therefore, the online journalism one comes across in this country, and in any country that still relies on slow dial-up access, is mostly based on text, images and graphics, much like the print media.

Features of Online Journalism

Online journalism has three defining characteristics – hypertextuality, interactivity and multimediality. These make it quite different not only from print but also from radio and television.

To effectively utilise the net's potential in online journalism or associated fields like online advertising, the practitioner needs to understand these characteristics and the way these change the nature of writing, authorship and reading, including the way meaning is produced when a reader ‘reads’ the text, which may be written text, image, graphic, etc.

Media practitioners – journalists, advertising and public relations professionals, layout artists, web developers and others – usually develop an intuitive understanding of the way narratives work in different media environments, including the online one.