Recent Trends in Online Journalism

No longer are journalists and the news constrained by the technical limitations of analog media boundaries of print, television, or radio. Instead all modalities of human communication are available for telling the story in the most compelling interactive, on- demand, and customized  fashion  possible.  
Of course, newsroom traditions and training, as well as newsroom economics, may ultimately determine whether journalists fully utilize these online capabilities to create better, more complete and conceptualized news reports. Nevertheless, the technology makes improved journalism possible. For example “Apbonline” is a news website covering crime throughout the United States and internationally. It is an internet-original, or purely online, news product; it has no print or broadcast parent. Not just confined to text reporting, the site utilized interactivity, images. It also illustrates the unique capabilities of online news. 
A 1998 study places these findings in the context of online journalism, reveals that the 80 percent of adult Americans who use online media rate online news sources as just as credible as traditional news providers.
The Internet has revolutionized the computer and communications world like nothing before. The invention of the telegraph, telephone, radio, and computer set the stage for this unprecedented integration of capabilities. The Internet is at once a world-wide broadcasting capability, a mechanism for information dissemination, and a medium for collaboration and interaction between individuals and their computers without regard for geographic location.

Information Super Highway

The Information superhighway is a term that is sometimes used to describe the Internet.
Nam June Paik, a 20th century South Korean born American video artist, claims to have coined the term in 1974. “I used the term (information superhighway) in a study I wrote for the Rockefeller Foundation in 1974. I thought: if you create a highway, then people are going to invent cars. That's dialectics. If you create electronic highways, something has to happen.” The term was popularized by former Vice President of the United States, Al Gore in the early 1990s in a speech outlining plans to build a high-speed national data communications network. 

 

Information superhighway is a popular collective name for the Internet and other related large-scale computer networks. 
The information superhighway can be defined as ‘an information and communication technology network, which delivers all kinds of electronic services-audio, video, text, and data, to households and businesses. It is usually assumed that the network will allow for two-way communication, which can deliver ‘narrow-band’ services like telephone calls as well as ‘broad-band’ capabilities such as video-on-demand, teleshopping, and other ‘interactive TV’ multi-media applications. Services on the superhighway can be one-to-one (telephone, electronic, mail, fax, etc) one-to-many (broadcasting, interactive TV, videoconferencing, etc); or many-to-many (bulletin-boards and forums on the internet). 
The example of the ‘information Superhighway’ is the internet, which had its roots in the need during the mid-1960s for linking military computer researchers in the United States. Commercialisation of the networks began when the internet was opened up to the priviate service providers like Prodigy, Delphi, Genie, America Online (AOL) and Compuserve. The World Wide Web was developed at the European center for Particle Research in 1989, but took off only in 1993 when software developed at the University of Illinois and subsequently elsewhere, created ‘browsers’ and graphical interfaces making the search and interrogation of ‘pages’ on the WWW possible. Hundreds of ‘sites’ were placed on the Web.

Cyber Space

Cyberspace is a domain characterized by the use of electronics and the electromagnetic spectrum to store, modify, and exchange data via networked systems and associated physical infrastructures. The term originates in science fiction, where it also includes various kinds of virtual reality experienced by deeply immersed computer users or by entities who exist inside computer systems.
Cyberspace is a metaphor for describing the non-physical terrain created by computer systems. Online systems, for example, create a cyberspace within which people can communicate with one another (via e-mail), do research, or simply window shop. Like physical space, cyberspace contains objects (files, mail messages, graphics, etc.) and different modes of transportation and delivery. Unlike real space, though, exploring cyberspace does not require any physical movement other than pressing keys on a keyboard or moving a mouse. 
Some programs, particularly computer games, are designed to create a special cyberspace, one that resembles physical reality in some ways but defies it in others. In its extreme form, called virtual reality, users are presented with visual, auditory, and even tactile feedback that makes cyberspace feel real