4. Online Publishing
Themes
While the final impact of the online delivery of news on the printed versions of the news media is not apparent, some trends can be identified. In the 2007 State of the News Print Media in Australia, the Council included reports from Fairfax and News Limited on their moves towards 24-hour newsrooms. These trends have accelerated during the most recent year, although an unanswered question is the extent to which there is a greater reliance, overnight, on the resources of the Australian news agency, AAP, for copy, and a lesser reliance on the publisher's own resources. This is of particular relevance to the Council when it has to deal with allegations of inaccuracy in agency-sourced material.
Fiona Martin's paper also looks at the effect on print media companies of the need to branch out into other media for their online site: including the use of streamed audio and video, and the use of supplemental material from journalists commenting on their own stories. Another obvious impact of the emergence of online news sites has been their impact on the revenue of newspapers that formerly relied on classified advertising to underwrite the costs of their journalism. Whether there will be some synergies between online and print classified remains to be determined. The latest figures from the Interactive Advertising Bureau Australia (http://www.iabaustralia.com.au) indicate that online classified revenues are "stagnating" in the most recent quarter. There are as yet no comparable data from the newspapers on whether their classified ads have increased. Whether any loss of revenue by newspapers from advertising will lead to a decline in the quality of journalism is a further issue for further exploration.
Another issue raised by convergence is the phenomenon of search engine optimisation—a more sophisticated version of the sales banner and screamer headline of old. Sites seeking to use search engines to maximise the number of visitors use a variety of techniques, some of which may be contrary to established journalistic practices regarding headlines and story openings. In order to maximise visits to their websites, headline writers of the new era will need to be much more literal and include more direct referents in headlines and lead paragraphs, because that's where the searchbots primarily go. What will disappear are the humorous, pun-ridden, and ironic headlines of the past.
A second paper, by Lindsay Simpson, follows her earlier papers on the same subject in the first two iterations of this report. She looks at the publication of weblogs (blogs) on newspaper websites. As the legal implications of publisher liability have become more apparent, blogs are now more stringently moderated (edited) and are becoming less distinguishable from opinion columns. Perhaps future explorations might compare newspaper site blogs with their more freewheeling unaffiliated siblings.