Book Review: The Handbook of Global Online Journalism

Abstract

Eugenia Siapera and Andreas Veglis (Eds.). The Handbook of Global Online Journalism. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012. 528 pp.Few would dispute that new information and communication technology (ICT) is reshaping the pattern of global news consumption. According to Pew's survey Trends in News Consumption: 1991-2012 (http://tinyurl.com/8r5v7rs), for example, search- ing for news online and from digital sources continues to grow. About one-half (46 percent) of Americans say they get news online days a week or more, with about one-third (32 percent) going online for news every day.Meanwhile Internet-based ICT is also reformatting news production. Online news outlets appear to become increasingly mainstream, supplanting the media, particularly newspapers. This trend can be seen partially from the peer recogni- tion of professional achievements in online journalism. In 2010, for instance, inves- tigative journalist at ProPublica and a cartoonist at SFGate.com, the San Francisco Chronicle's online portal, won Pulitzer Prizes for online-only editorial content for the first time in history. It is fair to say that such trends that is experiencing today have been restructuring the curriculum in education and training in higher education institutions. Although course titles vary among web, digital, interac- tive, multimedia, convergence, and the like, traditional education units have embraced the change, and more than one hundred digital/multimedia programs are offered across this country as of 2012 (http://www.mulinblog.com/ multimedia-journalism-programs/). The Handbook of Global Online Journalism, in this context, offers a timely option for students who want to keep themselves current with the online new media landscape, as well as for instructors who try to strike a fine balance between teaching theories and introducing cutting-edge practices concerning the gathering, production, dissemination, and consumption of news through Internet- based platforms globally.This edited volume features a collection of twenty-five chapters from researchers and practitioners who examine a variety of aspects related to online journalism, includ- ing theories, politics, production, practices, contents, and global contexts. The first highlight of this book is the editors' introduction that surveys the evolution of online journalism, relevant research, and theoretical strands. Borrowing ideas from the evolu- tion theory, Siapera and Veglis use the extinction and mutation of dinosaurs as a meta- phor to depict the development of online and help readers better understand the interaction between the ICT-driven changes in media environment and the advance of the modality of journalism.Trying to draw a holistic picture of the evolution of online journalism, the editors start by presenting an instructive analogy with the current fate of some of the many species of journalism (p. 2) and put forward three evolutionary possibilities (p. 4). For the first possibility, according to the editors, newspapers and print in general seem to be fading out like dinosaurs if they do not adapt to the dramatic changes taking place in mass media. Meanwhile, the main traits, values, or defining characteristics of journalism (p. 3), such as public service, objectivity, autonomy, and journalistic ethics, need to be reinterpreted through online news production against sociopolitical, economic, and technological changes. Second, traditional strives to survive by actively embracing new attributes of Internet-based communica- tion to revamp the production of news for online platforms. The particular character- istics, such as multimediality, interactivity, user-generated content, and personalization (p. 4), although not seen in traditional news production, make online fit naturally into the new media ecosystem. Then, mutation becomes possible as a higher level of evolution of online journalism. …