Is The Internet A Positive Or Negative Development For News Reporting Essay

Is The Internet A Positive Or Negative Development For News Reporting Essay Is The Internet A Positive Or Negative Development For News Reporting â€" Essay Example > Is the Internet A Positive or Negative Development for News Reporting? Introduction In this essay the answer to the question” is the Internet a positive or negative development for news reporting? ” will be answered. Now days when all news papers have websites, it becomes difficult to answer this question. In order to investigate this essay will analyze the benefits of news on internet while also keeping in mind the disadvantages of the traditional method of new reporting. Thesis statement The internet is a positive development for news reporting. Analysis Detail and AccuracyDetail and accuracy are obviously the first criteria that come to mind when judging the coverage of a news story. Every detail, answering every possible question, who, what, when, where, why and how is obviously top priority. A story missing critical details is certainly not news worthy; but even stories which leave out small pieces of information, can easily be looked upon as weak coverage. “Often tradi tional media is forced to omit particulars due to time or size restraints, and in these cases bias can play a huge role” (Yonghoi 2007). The Internet, on the other-hand, has seemed to flourish picking up on the traditional media's downfalls. Further explanation of this point will surface again during the course of my comparison. Answering the reader's questions about a story is also a valuable asset to any well-covered news. Again, if there are any unanswered questions the reader feels left in the dark, sometimes agitated, feeling he or she wasted their time on a story. News should be above all informative and if a reader is forced to look elsewhere for answers to their questions, then the reporter has failed to do his or her job. This tie into my third point on being under informed. “No amount of information is too much information, but, for example, we can't expect to see the complete history of the 'Taliban' in every news story regarding September 11th” (Allan 2006). This is an agonizing reality for traditional media such as the newspaper, but a reality that the Internet seems to thrive on. Nothing but frustration can come from not knowing pieces or background information of a story and surely this is a substantial factor in deciding what 'good coverage' really is. Best-CoverageNow that we have a formal definition of good news coverage, we can properly compare the two mediums and make a decision as to which provides the better coverage beginning with the most obvious, but possibly one of the strongest arguments. . There is no certainly no doubt that the second a story unfolds you will be able to read all about it on the Internet. Particularly, 'technological' news can be accessed within moments of its release; the major reason being because this is where the source of the news originates. For example, a worm called 'klez' was discovered on April 17th, 2002. Within seconds of its discovery a major distress call was sent out over the Internet warning users of its vicious nature. Websites such as symantec. com and technews. com had documentation and cleaning instructions almost instantly available for public use in order to prevent the spread of the worm. But for some reason the 'klez' worm has become the most widespread and troublesome email virii to date. Why did this happen? Was it because the code for the worm was exceptionally well written? This is very doubtful. Was it because we didn't know about it? Well for some of us that may be true. “After what seemed to be an endless search I found little to no information posted in any of my local newspapers. This is news, and big news. Months later the worm is still causing problems for millions of people around the world “(Randal 2004).