What is online Journalism?
It could be defined as the reporting of news produced and distributed via the internet, be it blog, website or the newly highly emerging social networks.
Print newspaper circulation is declining and consumers are increasing accessing news online. Amongst other reasons why people shift to online news rather than print newspapers is that it’s easy to access news online without leaving the comfort of your home.
I’m going to start with Sowetan online site.
http://www.sowetanlive.co.za/
First of all, the site has a teaser panel that contains same features every day. The features consist of leading “shwashwi” story, leading political story and a daily cartoon lined at the top of the site. Beneath the teaser is a line of paper sections which don’t change as well.
The sections include home, news, business, sport, entertainment, columns, goodlife, help line, “shwashwi”, and jobs. This line is imperative because the story of your choice is just a click away. It does have a variety of interesting sections and stories as it’s a tabloid. The only monotonous problem with it is that it doesn’t have multimedia platforms like videos and audios. This means that the only available material is text that is boring at times.
The second news site for my tour is ewn
The appearance of ewn site is not appealing because of the black and white colours used in the site. As a result it looks very dull.
On top of this site there is a teaser panel that contains sections of the whole site. The sections include latest, news, local, world, sport, politics, opinion, features, business, multimedia, traffic, iWitness, RSS, feeds and contact. This site is more focused on news content and not design.
That is the reason why its design is so monotonous but its sections are mind-blowing. It also has the section of multimedia that many other news sites do not have. The multimedia section has audios and videos that are ideal for taking break from text reading. Below the site it’s the social networks that the site is using which audience can use to voice out their opinions regarding the published stories.
This site is more convenient because RSS feeds, iPhone/iPad supporting feature which is iWitness and podcasts are also available.
The third news site for my tour is News24.
http://www.news24.com/
This site is more interesting because besides having a teaser panel of leading stories that all other sites has, it has quite varying features. The first feature that makes this site unique from others is that it has weather information of the day at corner of the far right hand side. Next to the weather feature again it a search box that enables one to search for desired stories with ease. Dominantly it used blue colour in and around the site because it is their main colour. With this site, one is spoiled for choice as under every section there are sub-topics. It also includes property section that all above mentioned sites do not have.
