ONLINE JOURNALISM

Sipho Ramaru

Online news and journalism is slowly and gradually growing in South Africa, this is because of the technological developments taking place almost every day of our lives. Technology has been improving over the last few decades to make our lives better and easier with new innovations being implemented by media houses. Through ICT’s (Information Communication Technologies), it is more convenient to spread news faster and reach millions because most people nowadays have access to computers and internet.

Online reporting has made a major impact in the 21^st century hence a lot of things have changed in the media world whereby news are uploaded and updated every minute online. It is more faster, easier and efficient that whenever you log-on to any news website there’ll always be latest updates on a variety of topics or headlines.

News24 is an online publication with a variety of multimedia elements such as visuals, pictures and audios. They update news every now and then just to keep the public up to speed with latest news and headlines. Their use of multimedia is on point because their website has a lot of aspects with news (and pictures included), advertisements and many other services that also accommodate isizulu speaking people to be specific.  http://isizulu.news24.com/NingizimuAfrika

Daily Sun also have a website that you can also access online with a personal computer on smart phone. The use of multimedia on their website is not really on point. It is lacking creativity because there aren’t many elements that are attractive. In simple terms; it lacks creativity the layout is too plain and there aren’t videos or audios it only has picture. http://www.dailysun.co.za/

The website is from the newspaper ‘The Times’ which is a daily newspaper that is delivered free to 137,054 members that are subscribers (according to the latest Audit Bureau of Circulations statistics). It caters for South Africans and keep the people informed and also updated. timeslive website have a lot diverse segments and they are all designed for that particular section. Unlike other websites, this one gives you options to view contents of your choice; it has its own blog that is focused more on entertainment and fashion where people can interact and give feedback. http://blogs.timeslive.co.za/

Online journalism has made news reporting easier and it is more efficient to use with the use of advance technology. Online publications differ in their own unique ways and they offer different services to their users/readers and one other it is cost-effective whereby you get a lot of content at a low cost unlike a newspaper whereby you pay a certain amount and you are limited to news that are published.