Analysing: Is online news reaching it's potential? By Nora Paul

I found this article extremely interesting and rather educating. Through reading this article I was able to learn of the expectations people had for the web over 10 years ago in comparison to what the web has on offer now.

Nora has gathered much evidence supporting the many expectations we have lived up to and the many that we haven’t. Although I do feel that Nora may have been slightly to vague in her discussions as many of the examples she gave were American sites, whilst in comparison I believe that many English sites are very different and in some senses do exceed the expectations that were suggested all those years ago.

In Nora’s hyper-linking section she talks of a recent check of the New York Times online, showing no stories with external links-most of which required a payment of $2.95 in order to read. This is not the case for many English sites, which I think use hyper-linking to a great extent and in my eyes use it well, many of them do not have to be paid for my the reader as Nora suggests.

However, I do agree with the fact that communication between reporter and reader is not always a two-way communication as was once hoped. This is mainly due to the fact as Nora rightly states 'some reporters find it a potential time suck.'

Nora is right in saying that people now often result to becoming part of a forum to get the personal discussion and communication they long for. This of course shows a new idea that has been introduced that was not expected or thought of ten years ago and in some sense is better than the two way communication that was once expected.

Overall, I do agree to a certain extent with what Nora is suggesting within this article. She has brought to light the fact that although the web may not have reached its full potential regarding what was expected 10 years ago, it has acknowledged the expectations and that most of them do exist just not to the level that was expected.

Having read this article I have come to the conclusion that many news companies do not take the web as seriously or see it as important as their print publication. I think that when or 'if ' these news companies do come to realise that the internet is an extremely powerful and everlasting way of providing depth and scope in many of their stories, and that many people do infact long for this informaion, then maybe all that was expected of the web would in fact come into action today.