The Importance Of Digital Journalism

As the internet became well known in the 1960’s, the media used it as a way of spreading news and information to masses. Traditional journalism used to be a one-way process. We had to rely and hope for credibility in the editors’, reporters’ and photographers’ given information. Thus, digital journalism was developed and made journalism interactive and allowed discussion and debates among readers and writers. Printed news is assumed to be straightforward, simple, and as understandable as possible for the average reader to understand it clearly. Traditional journalistic writing essentially has the summary lead to give the reader a short kind of preview as to what he/she will be reading. It ought to be written in a way that attracts the reader’s attention. It is written in a form of an inverted pyramid wherein the most important facts and

The inverted pyramid is very advantageous in printed copies because it gives the gist of the news to the readers outright while digital journalism has found another way of writing and editing news articles. “Hypertext now enables journalists to write on-line stories that are multi-dimensional” (Herbert, 1999, p. 2) Now, journalists can write in a way that give readers more freedom of choosing from just reading that one particular article, dive much deeper into the subject matter by clicking the hyperlinks to read about the meaning or definitions of uncommon and exclusive technical terms used in the text, or allowing the reader to discover other articles that are related to the main story by clicking on links provided. These are only some of the ways of how a reader can read published online stories and it depends on the preferences of the reader. Unlike traditional writing which is logical and analytical in manner, the links provided in online articles are organized assisting ideas made for further explanations and references for the