Although the internet is relatively new to the modern world, it has rapidly begun to integrate itself into our daily lives. Within the past few years, it has become one of the major media of communication and news resources in today's society. Journalism and the retelling of news has appeared in all forms through the years: in television broadcasting, printed news, speciality magazines and even in historical novels and arts. It's not a surprise that this infant medium would soon take its place up with the established and trusted sources for news. But, can something so new be trusted? In a medium where anyone can upload a web page to the whole world, no one knows which news is fake and which news is real. At least with newspapers, we have our established names: the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times - and even with television, we think we can trust our nightly news anchors on the national television stations. Still, studies show that the Internet still is a main, if not the most significant source for news.
The names in the online medium have just recently begun to make a place for themselves. They have a long road ahead of them, but also an interesting, yet relatively short, history.
The internet began as primarily a connection of a few government computers used mainly for military purposes. Eventually, very basic things began to grow out of it: "gopher" programs and download areas, "file transfer protocol" spaces, and simple e-mail. With the creation of HTML (HyperText Markup Language) which could let you jump from site to site through links, translator programs, or "web browsers" were created. Then came the first web pages- and with them, the first bits of news- whether the news was personal, local or breaking, it was there. The evolution of online news wasn't slow- in fact, most of the growth took place within a single year.
With this quick and recent influence of the Internet as a news source, it became difficult to differentiate between the more established news sources and those that didn't quite make the cut. Sites like MSNBC , we know we can trust because they have an established name already in television news. But, with journalists like Mike Drudge (who broke the Monica Lewinksy scandal), his site has been considered more of a "rumor central" than a source for legitimate news. Yet this does not detour people from using the sites, as news websites offer the quickest, most accurate statistics on news stories. Users need to be careful about which sources they can really trust- personal pages or professional ones. Due to the Internet's premature status, and degree of spontaneity, one can never be sure exactly what the future holds for this vast and infinite resource.
Links: ABC News: http://www.abcnews.com CNN: http://www.cnn.com MSNBC: http://www.msnbc.com CBS: http://www.cbs.com CBS Up To The Minute News: http://www.uttm.com/ Fox News: http://www.foxnews.com/ National Public Radio: http://www.realaudio.com/contentp/npr.html PBS News Hour: http://www.pbs.org/newshour/ BBC News: http://news.bbc.co.uk/ Canadian Broadcasting Corporation: http://www.cbc.ca/ glossary of terms
