Online editing

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An online editorial team creates journalistic articles for publication on a company's Internet or intranet .

activity

Online editorial offices prepare journalistic content for the Internet. To do this, they use the hypertext principle. This can be done in the context of public relations on behalf of a company or an institution, as a supplement to a classic medium such as a magazine or exclusively for the Internet.

Due to the increasing importance of the Internet medium, organizations such as print magazines and newspapers , television stations and news agencies have set up their own online editorial offices. First of all, they brought the content of the respective medium online to a website - mostly changed, especially abbreviated. In the meantime, however, most online editorial offices produce or integrate independent, online content .

development

There are increasing numbers of online magazines that are only published online without a parent medium. Advantage: In contrast to a print magazine, the production costs significantly less. In addition, an online magazine is ahead of the print magazine - the latter appears at most once a day (in the case of some daily newspapers : twice). Online editorial offices can thus publish content at shorter intervals. You are constantly updating the web pages and can publish reports on events within minutes of the occurrence.

Online editorial offices are also independent of location; they can also be easily operated, primarily through correspondents in other countries. An online editorial department should therefore be understood more virtually than spatially. There are more and more web magazines with a compilation of articles on certain topics, behind which there are single computers of correspondents and editors accessing a common content management system at different locations, than a fixed open -plan office .

conditions

Online editors sometimes have to have different skills than their colleagues in the classic media. For example, they have to be aware of their reading behavior on the screen . This requires shorter and easier to understand texts. Because the reader on the Internet does not read a text from A to Z. Rather, the eye skims over longer text passages and gets stuck on highlighting such as bold text, lists and headings. In addition, online editors need to consider the expectations of Internet users. These do not expect information that is strung like a pearl necklace, but bits of text that are linked to one another via hyperlinks .

Online editors must have computer skills and, above all, they should be able to operate a content management system .

Topicality

Up-to-dateness plays an essential role in an online editorial office. The challenge is to have news and information available 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Especially in the information society , which is characterized by fast pace and a short half-life of information, constant topicality and availability are of great importance.

ubiquity

It is not only the topicality of a message that is sometimes more important than the quality of the message. The constant availability of the news source is also important for the recipient: The user does not want to leave the house to go to a library or archive , or forego the latest information on the go, but rather the latest news on their own PC , PDA or mobile phone immediately available.

Challenges

Challenges arise from the time pressure that exists especially in the Internet medium. Since it depends on who publishes first, everything has to happen very quickly. Articles or analyzes and not yet foreseeable developments of an event may therefore be published prematurely. The editorial quality management is required here, which has to balance speed with accuracy . Other critical points that are related to the time factor may include a loss of quality due to a lack of control or poor research .

A lack of objectivity is also a possible consequence. This is due to the fact that either content is taken over from other media and reproduced without reflection, or the editor is no longer able to obtain votes from the opposition or additional opinions .

Quality management is required for the challenges mentioned . It has to be tailored individually to the respective needs. It is necessary to find the right balance between high quality and quickly published texts.

Online editorial workflow

The workflows are similar to the workflows in an editorial office , but there are a few differences:

  • Articles in an online editorial department do not always have to be created in this. If there is a corresponding print medium, then it is possible that the articles of the print editorial team will also be published.
  • In an editorial office, the content and layout must be ready by the printing deadline. In an online editorial office, this is not the case, as it is published around the clock - the article goes online as soon as it is finished. You don't have to worry about the layout either, since an online editorial team usually works with ready-made templates .
  • Editing is possible online at any time. In order to add changes , corrections or updates at a later date, it is not necessary to create a separate article, but the original text can be adapted directly.

financing

For the reader, online magazines have the advantage of being largely free of charge and directly available at home. However, being free of charge forces the publishers to finance themselves primarily through advertising .

Since the end of the 1990s , this led to strong cutthroat competition, to which several commercial online magazines fell victim (see also dot-com bubble ). Others established themselves as competitors to their own print editions.

Since around 2005, new financing models have been emerging that primarily rely on income from online business ( online first : first on the Internet).

See also

literature

  • Saim Rolf Alkam: Texts for the Internet. Practical book for online editors and web copywriters. Galileo Press Bonn 2004, ISBN 3-89842-493-6 .
  • Thomas Holzinger, Martin Sturmer: The online editorial team. Practical book for Internet journalism. Springer Berlin Heidelberg 2009, ISBN 978-3-642-00719-4 .
  • Gabriele Hooffacker : Online journalism. Writing and designing for the internet. A Manual for Education and Practice. 3. Edition. Econ, Berlin 2010, ISBN 978-3-430-20096-7 .
  • Martin Löffelholz, Thorsten Quandt, Thomas Hanitzsch, Klaus-Dieter Altmeppen: Online journalists in Germany. Central findings of the first representative survey of German online journalists. In: Media Perspektiven. 10/2003, pp. 477-486.
  • Klaus Meier (ed.): Internet journalism. 3rd revised and expanded edition. UVK, Constance 2002.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Theguardian.com : The digital challenge.Retrieved June 10, 2008.
  2. a b What consumers want from online news. Retrieved June 10, 2008.