When considering the question of "what constitutes 'news' on the web" we must take into account people's perceptions of news and what news is worthy of making headlines. As what is important to one person is different to someone living over the other side of the world.
So what is 'news' on the web? Robert Burnett and P. David Marshall argue that "news has become a subset of a wider search for information by web users"(paragraph 7) suggesting that news on the web has just become a search for information, a hyperlinking activity.
Online news allows Internet users to find exactly what they want and ignore the news stories which they are not interested in, creating a diversity in what people think is news.
The web allows a greater variety of stories and many different interpretations, eg. a westernised view of the state of the economy will differ from the views of the eastern countires.
Meikle suggests we as online news readers become 'researchers' and we begin to 'research' what we want to find on the Internet in terms of news. This idea links with that of Burnett and Marshall, we 'research' for information when online.
Meikle suggests that we then "hierarchise" sources which seems to us more legitimate, for example websites such as CNN News or BBC which we have learnt to trust.
It is addressed that weblogs and newsgroups are considered worthy for news stories but what makes us want to pay attention to certain sites? Perhaps it is that sites such as BBC or CNN News are large, recognised sites and are visited and trusted by thousands - does this therefore make their news more believable? Surely yes, because it is written by professional journalists.
But is Burnett and Marshall are correct, then perhaps 'news' is just a search for information, and what we find depends on what we see as 'news'.
Personally, I find it hard to trust 'news' found via some websites I am unsure of. I retrieve news from websites I know are legitimate and which have news-worthy stories. But then what I see as new-worthy maybe different from others.
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I agree with you on trusting news that come from a recognised site or organisation. It's hard to belive a story from someone whos had no journalist training. Not only for the style of the story, but for the legal implications that come with being a journalist. If a person follows Turkle's idea of personas, and decides to write a story from a different point of view, or uses the internet as a way to exaggerate a story, then we can't trust it. But there's no way of telling whos truthful and whos not? The topic of news is always going to bring up issues of trust though, because a lot of the time it can be seen as biased, do you think online news would let you open your eyes to stories that haven't been through intense editing to fit in the style of a program?
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