The 5 W's & 1 H

The main difference between a newspaper and an article written by an online journalist is that the article never really ends, it never finishes. It is always updated. It seems like once the article you wrote is posted online, its like you sold your work because people can be linked to it, comment it, discussed, broken up, etc... It's like a piece of art. No one likes there art to be rewened. Online journalism can be considered an art form because it shows creativity. But what if the audience wants to assist a journalist in keeping this art alive by participating and being an active audience? To do that an audience, like some jouralists, should be asking the questions regarding when,where,why, what, who and how. When it comes to Who, we should be asking ourselves who should we tell about this article. People feel like they want to be involved with an issue when it is presented and they want to inform others. Who should they inform? Possibly a community interest group or someone that cares about this issue. This is where social networking can come in handy because you can spread the word by a few clicks of a few buttons. What, should be brought up when we want to know what sources did the journalist use to get this information. A lot of journalists these days don't provide concrete evidence as to where they got there information from. I think something that the consumer should start doing more often is commenting or emailing the journalist and asking them to provide direct links to the sites were he got the information from. Right away when I think of where, I think of where the story is exactly taking place. The best way to do this and some journalists did it when the brushfires spread in California was to use google maps. Even though it questions the privacy of people, I think it is a useful tool for anything and the California wildfires was a perfect example of something to use it for. The LA Times today still does stuff like this. Check this out. http://projects.latimes.com/homicide/blog/page/1/. When it comes to remembering dates and things of that nature you must ask when. When you read something about an event or festival and you want to remember it because you no you won't be seeing this article again what can you do? The journalists should make news calenders where you can post events up that you want to attend and they can send texts, emails or whatever to remind you of it. The last w is why. Why should you care promote this issue? The journalist in this situation needs to stress the reasons good enough to the audience of why the should care and inform others. Perhaps an example would be making a connection with the oil spill and the affect its going to have on the average americans wallet. Or what I thought was a cool example on BBC about they have a calculator that tells you how a new budget affects you (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/shared/bsp/hi/business/budget_calc/html/budget_calculator.stm). That might grab a lot of peoples' attention. The reader in a situation like this can only relate it to the next person and basically promote the journalist by saying "You know this guy is good, the articles he writes about really relate to us and our daily lives" or something along those lines. I think when it comes to how, it basically surrounds the 5 w's and you ask yourself how can I help or make a difference. The internet has a lot of directions and steps to doing something about almost every issue. Once you answer the last 5 questions gather up your audience and participate to make a change.