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Stovall, James Glen.  Web Journalism:  Practice and Promise of a New Medium.  Boston:  Pearson Allyn and Bacon, 239 pp, ISBN 0-205-35398-3

We all use the Web more than we did a few years ago, and we are going to depend on it more in the future.  From a journalistic standpoint, such a move in web use signals a change in how journalists work and get us information.  According to Dr. Jim Stovall, the most significant change will be the equation of the relationship between reporter and audience.  It is changing.  There will be more immediate communication among reporters and readers, and the readers will be able to participate in stories in a more direct way.

This book, one of the first of its kind in the field, explores these philosophical issues, and then goes into specific ways that journalists can change what they are doing to adapt to this new medium.  In the first chapter, Stovall discusses how the web increases the capacity of stories that can be covered.  Where before length and space were issues, now they are not.  Stories can find their own length on the web.  Further, the web is more flexible than other forms of journalism. It uses words, pictures, audio, video, and graphics.  A web journalist needs some knowledge in all of these areas to reach maximum effectiveness.

The web is more immediate.  There is no lag time in how quickly a story can be posted.  It can be done immediately.  In fact, according to Dr. Stovall, the most successful web sites aggressively update their pages as a marketing tool.  If consumers can always get news instantly on the web, why should they wait for a newspaper or magazine, not that these forms don’t have their strengths.  Finally, the web is permanent.  Once a story regardless of length lands there, huge files can be saved forever in a variety of digital ways, so our access to archival information will expand exponentially over time.

Stovall helps journalists, whether novices or experienced practitioners, learn how to use this new medium.  He devotes chapters to photojournalism, graphics, and audio and video.  For instance, one adaptation involves the classic inverted pyramid approach to writing news stories.  This approach also works on the web, but there is the possibility of layering stories and creating hypertexts with links to numerous sources on the web.  More detail can be added to portions of the story that follow the beginning, and links can be added throughout the text.  Readers do not necessarily have to approach a story in a linear fashion.  Their approach can be multi-directional, multi-layered. Given this possibility, writers have a great deal of new responsibility and control over determining how people access stories.

Another example of an adaptation necessary on the web regards the concept of a summary.   Summaries have been around in one form or another forever; however, summaries are very important in web journalism.  Instead of a typical lead paragraph, which tries to hook readers with the most interesting idea in the story, a summary paragraph identifies the key concepts and focus of a story.   Readers can then decide whether or not they want to access the whole story.  Finally, Dr. Stovall discusses new structures of writing that appear on the web, such as e-mail and personal messaging, FAQs [frequently asked questions], and weblogs [“a compendium of short entries on a web site devoted to a particular subject” (87).

Writing stories for the web is not the only area of web journalism that Dr. Stovall addresses.  For instance, he discusses the new skills facing editors.  Web site editors need to examine not only the quality and precision of the writing but also the number and kind of links writers are using.  The editor needs to play a more pivotal role in deciding which links should stay, or which ones should be eliminated.  This is a new task for editors.  Further, given that more stories on the web will have the possibility of input from information from variety of sources and geographic locations, more stories will be written in teams, and editors will need to manage this process on-line, as opposed to managing it face to face.  Finally, editors will be the people who pay most attention to the tone and style of the web site, and this task will require a wide knowledge of things other than words alone.

Stovall also talks about how to design a web page, how to engage an audience for these new web sites, and he describes how web based new organizations like MSNBC work, and how they are different and yet much like all journalistic endeavors.  A colleague of Dr. Stovall writes the chapter on legal issues in publishing on the web, giving readers key pieces of information they need for their own protection.  Each chapter has discussion questions and activities, a list of references, and a list of web sites that can be accessed for more detailed information on topics discussed in the chapter.  There are also numerous sidebars that address issues surrounding web journalism. For instance, one sidebar tells the story of when the Drudge Report, a web site, posted an item that Newsweek Magazine had killed an article on an affair between President Clinton and an intern.  This web article actually is what broke the story.  Other sidebars deal with practical issues such as style on the information superhighway (95) and “The Five Commandments of Copywriting” (98-99).  Sections called Cool Ideas also share new ideas with readers, such as the existence of software that will record handwritten notes, save them, and translate them into digital form that can be printed in whatever form needed.  Another Cool Idea describes how consumers can subscribe to personalized comics that give consumers only the comics they want, for a price, of course.

The very last chapter delves into issues that will help all of us cross the bridge into the future.  Dr. Stovall discusses the impact of being able to distribute information immediately.  However, he also demonstrates that having maximum access to information does not negate the necessity of someone processing this information for readers, giving readers a sense of how it all makes sense and how readers might access the information.  This search engine needs to be a human being, not a computer program.  Also, all of this new “stuff” does not ultimately change the nature of the job of being a journalist, which is to get readers information, the story.  Finally, in Stovall’s opinion, the biggest issue to be explored and resolved is one that he raised in the beginning of the book.  What is the new equation between readers and writers going to look like?  No one knows for sure, and the answer to this question will determine what web journalism and all journalism will be in the future.

Anyone interested in writing and communicating through this new medium

would benefit from reading this book, and I highly recommend it.

Reviewed by Edgar H. Thompson, Emory & Henry College, ehthomps@ehc.edu

Click here to read an interview with Stovall.

Click here to read the review of Web Journalism by Stovall.