jueves, 27 de octubre de 2011

An inmature Medium, from Ramón Salaverría

This report want to summarize the article from Ramón Salaverría about the role that internet newspapers played in the 11S terrorist attacks.
The objetc of the intestigation are 18 online newspapers from different countries. About Spain, Salaverría will analyse elpais.es and elmundo.es because they have the biggest number of visitors in our country.



News Relevance of September 11 events

In that attack, more than 3,000 people dead, there were thousand of injured people, the most significant area of Manhatan was destroyed, the Pentagon was damaged and four commercial aircrafts were hijacked and crashed. These facts cause an act of mass-mediated terrorism, and the factors that contributed to magnify this media impact were the space and the time factor.

About the space, Twin Towers were the most famous urban landscapes, and Pentagon evokes secrecy and invulnerability. So, both places assured a maximun exposure for the media. For that reason, hundreds of journalists and cameras can access to these areas very quickly.

The time factor was relevant too. The time which the attacks started 8.46 a.m. in New York, 13.46 GMT; allowed maximun live media coverage. In addition, the rhythm of development of events produced a frantic information beat and this contributed to maintain the atonishment and the visual attraction at all times.

WWW became the platform which users massively rushed to search information. According to google, during the two following hours the start of the attacks, an average of 6,000 searches of the acronym CNN were performed every minute. 80% of 500 most searched words of that day in google were related to the terrorist attacks.



The Weakness of Online Newapapers on the News Coverage of Septembre 11 events

A few minutes after the news of the first attack broadcast, Internet had to respod to a sudden multiplication of traffic, and many online newspapers (the most famous) collapsed. The smaller media offered more satisfactory technological performance to the public's information demands than the larger media.

In addition, the spreading of news without a clear verification was a general trend on a good proportion of digital publications. After analysing the selectionated media, we discover that on September 11 in response to the information needs of the public, editors took the decision of giving priority to the last minute news, before data could be verified. Journalists understood that the evanescent of character of digital media as a justification for impunity and for that reason, wasn't neccessary to correct errors in the next publication. (Click here to saw elpais.es 11s error information)

So, in conclusion, online media journalists tended to give more importance to speed than to acuracy, and they adopted some sense of impunity justified by this need for speed.

If we talk about de own identity of the online media, it is important to emphasize that the most part of these media modified their layout and their character in order to be the first media in publishing breaking news. The online media which mantain the standart layout, didn't publish any background piece at all homepages.


Strenghts of the Online Newspapers

September 11 events proved that the Internet press has its particular character and its particular audience. And after that fact, the news web sites increased very much the users visit.
Paradoxically, that growth in audience rating occured when online media had economic problems because advertisment in that web sites reduced drastically.


In addition, it will be an important development of multimedia information, becase the web was used as a platform to offer the last minute news and also as an archive for providing context and background data with news content in images, sounds, multimedia products, interactive infographics... that television and radio didn't have. These actions, aided to configurated new journalistic formats for the web.

Here, you can see one infographic product from elmundo.es

















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