The Influence of Remediation on Participatory News Culture

A medium is that which remediates. It is that which appropriates the techniques, forms and social significance of other media and attempts to rival of refashion them in the name of the real. A medium in our culture can never operate in isolation, because it must enter into relationships of respect and rivalry with other media. (Bolter2 65) In relation to news and journalism, media is most commonly identified as the methods of communicating to a wide range of people. Traditionally, these methods include print, radio and television. However, digitization and the rise of the Internet has introduced a new definition of media: the digital technologies that enable wide spread communication. Furthermore, the Internet is recognized for its ability to support multiple media or multiple digital technologies like text, images, video, sound, and hypermedia. Digitization has also led to an important shift in the communication and presentation of mass information. The Internet allows traditional news to be remediated for the web by incorporating multiple digital technologies. The consumers of online news sources are able to interact with the digital media that are part of the remediated form, resulting in a participatory news culture. Structurally, corporate news web sites present material in a similar manner to traditional printed news. In fact, traditional print has inspired the "newspaper metaphor" for electronic news, which by definition is "a newspaper layout of text and photographs, supplemented with television video, in-newspaper-like metaphor" (Watters 136). The newspaper metaphor has been adopted for online news because users already understand the page structure and sectional organization of newspapers (Watters 137). Printed news generally appears in article form displaying a headline, by-line, summary text and main body. Furthermore, the articles are organized in order of importance with the main page and first section being the most apparent to the reader and