Week 5, Meikle a) and b)

The benefit to having online news is that it can be updated immediately, so the news is always up to date, whereas for example, newspapers are only updated with new news daily. As well as this, specific news concerning something you may have a personal interest in, can be easily accessed. Online news is meant to be informative to people all over the world, but are news stories that are covered in England relevant to somebody in, for example, China? To some extent yes, they are, but often they are not. There is also the question of who is writing the stories. A British writer may have a completely different opinion or outlook about something than for example, a French journalist. This goes against Meikle's ideas about news reports needing to be unconstrained by geography.
Because of news being accessible on the internet, and anyone being able to publish things on the internet, it reverses the previous power structure of news. The passive audience can now contribute to the news itself, and involve themselves in producing news articles. Ordinary people with no journalism experience can now publish articles and write their own opinions about the news . But will this ever catch on? Personally, if I want to access the news online, I will visit site such as BBC or MSN to ensure that I read reports by credible journalists, so does the online news community really change what we read?