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Viability of Online Newspapers in Activating the Sri Lankan Public Sphere

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VISTAS Journal of Humanities 8t Social Sciences Volume 6 Skcem&e*. 2010 VIABILITY OF ONLINE NEWSPAPERS IN ACTIVATING THE SRI LANKAN PUBLIC SPHERE. Theodore A. Fernando It is the mandate of the Fourth Estate in a democracy to disseminate information and facilitate dialogue among people on contemporary issues of significance. Globally, the advent of the internet also means that there would be an unprecedented revolution in democratic communication, free of regime based controls, triggering a paradigm shift by challenging the traditional top down elitist model of communication. To what extent has this materialized in Sri Lanka? An extensive literature review on the subject coupled with the content analysis of online newspapers and Sri Lankan web news sites and interviews conducted with some of the senior editors and persons in charge of the main newspapers help to answer the specified questions. Though there are 54 online newspapers and news web sites in Sri Lanka, the findings of our study show that this mode of communication has a long way to go to reach maturity; nevertheless we recognize theoretically its great potential in democratizing a society with diverse and conflicting viewpoints. Prevailing attitudinai and institutional constraints both politically as we/// as institutionally prevent online newspapers and websites from utilizing interactive features that will bring in a more bottom up dialogue and an egalitarian communication environment. Most of the online newspapers in Sri Lanka engage in 'Showelware', just transplanting their print edition in the web. Key features of the online newspapers such as, hourly dissemination of news, hypertextuality, personalizaton, functional and adaptive interactivity, and the virtual community model are yet to be used in a appropriate manner. However, the newspaper editors have not understood the potential that the online journalism offers in maximizing the capacity of the Political and Public Sphere. I. INTRODUCTION The proponents of the internet assert that one of its central characteristics is to converge different media forms into networks and enable varied modes of communication. Taking into account the criteria of audience size and the type of reciprocity between communicators, it is argued that computer-mediated communication provides one-to-one, one-to-many and many- to-many models of communication. In this way, the internet plays with the boundaries that have traditionally delineated personal, interpersonal and mass communication (Burnett & Marshall, 2003; Rice, 1999). Along with other numerous state-of-the- art inventions, the diffusion of the internet during the recent past has created a substantial online newspaper industry around the globe. As of April 20001, more than 4,400 newspapers provided online services worldwide, of which 3,161 were based in North America, 1634 in Europe, 269 in South America, and 214 in Asia (Editor & Latest figures could not be found. 68 VISTAS Journal of Humanities St Social Sciences Volume 6 3kcemSffi2C10 Publisher Interactive, 2000). The first online newspapers appeared only a few years ago in 1995, and since then both academics and media practitioners have speculated on the nature of the online press (Nielsen, 2000 & Boczkowski, 2002). Many radio and TV stations too, offer online news sites now. By the year 2000, one in four web users was reading news online, according to the Nielsen/Net Ratings survey (Donatello, 2002). The Chicago Tribune takes the credit for being the first ever local online newspaper, which first delivered its content electronically in text form in 1992 (Singer, 1998). The tremendous economic potential and theoretical implications make the emergence and continuing growth of the online newspaper industry worthy of media research and scholarly attention. Ideally, along with content-sharing, online newspapers as a distinct medium are technically capable of producing interactive, multimedia content such as online forums, searchable news archives, links to related stories, frequent updates, and web casting. However, many online newspapers are accused of producing shovelware by simply moving whatever is published in the newspaper onto the web without significant repackaging of the content for the new online medium. In many instances, online newspapers consist of multimedia content, interactivity, immediacy and other media characteristics, which altogether constitute a specific digital genre. However, in some cases, as already explained, the online editions in the web are not more than electronic versions of the parent newspaper. Some others are hybrids of printed newspapers and the original content. But, there are some online news sites which contain large amounts of original material created by a separate staff. Katz, (1999) believes that the future of journalism is found on the Internet and that online news will one day become the mainstream journalism. He further notes that the old model of a few people providing information to many is "breaking down" in favour of many providing to many. As Chung, (2007) states, the use of interactive features of the internet has the potential to trigger a paradigm shift, in mass media by challenging the traditional uni-directional flow of messages through features that provide bi-directional or even multi-directional communication. In the same vein, Gunter, (2003) predicts that while the online users may still be rely on journalists to produce a digestible copy, the end users no longer have to depend on journalists to tell them what they can or should read. Since the concept of interactivity is an important aspect of communication, it is desirable to distinguish two types of interactivity put forward by the communication scholars, namely the distinction between human interactivity and medium interactivity. This may also be referred to as user-to-user vs user-to medium (system, document) interactivity or interpersonal vs content interactivity (Massey & Levy, 1999). Several scholars have identified this distinction as important (Lee, 2000; Outing, 1998). Stromer & Galley, (2000) also recognized this separation between the two types of interactivity in their research on political candidate websites. They consider human interactivity to be more interactive than medium interactivity because it more closely resembles face-to-face interpersonal communication, According to Oeuze, (2003), the interactive options on websites can be subdivided into 69 VISTAS Journal of Humanities K Social Sciences Volume 6 2kcem6et201C three types: (1) navigational interactivity, which means that the user is allowed to navigate in a more or less structured way through 'Next Page' and 'Back to Top' buttons or scrolling menu bars; (2) functional interactivity, which means, a user can participate to some extent in the production process of the site by interacting with other users or the producers of a particular page or site by means of direct mail, links, bulletin board systems and moderated discussion lists; (3) adaptive interactivity, which means that every action of the user has consequences for the content site as the site's programming adapts itself to the surfing behaviour of every individual user, and 'remembers' users' preferences, allowing them to upload, annotate and discuss their own content, offering chat rooms and personal customization through smart web design. In the context of 'interactivity' as a key feature of online newspapers, as discussed above, let us focus on the core area of this research in the following section. 2. ONLINE NEWSPAPERS IN SRI LANKA With the advent of the internet, terms such as E-Democracy, E-Resistance, E-Commerce, E- Research, E-Governance, E-Medicine, E-Channeling, E-Money, E-Banking and E-Papers have become buzz words even in developing countries like Sri Lanka. As advocated by its proponents, the internet has the potency to become a new catalyst for political freedom, democracy and social change. Moreover, the internet has the potential to transform the face of public communication, more specifically the public sphere, through interactive, collaborative and many-to-many communication. Yet, has it happened in Sri Lanka or is it happening? Is the dream of participatory communication realized? If not, why? In the context given above, this preliminary paper is an exploratory study on the development of the online news services by Sri Lankan newspapers and other electronic journals of Sri Lanka. Since online newspapers are a new medium for mass communication, there have been few studies on them. A project called LEARN (Lanka Experimental Academic and Research Network) by the University of Moratuwa in Sri Lanka in 1990 made the first step towards launching the connectivity between academic and research communities in Sri Lanka and the internet. To cite the Central Bank reports, the so called Internet Age in Sri Lanka officially began in 1995 when Lanka Internet Services (Pvt) Ltd provided the first commercial and unrestricted internet facility via a local server based in Colombo. The e- market in Sri Lanka has grown in leaps and bounds, since there are over 30 companies currently holding licenses for Internet Service Provision. Also there have been over 823,000 fixed access (Sri Lanka Telecom) telephone lines in service. According to the available figures, in the year 2008 alone, there were 77,100 internet users in Sri Lanka, for a total population of 21,128,773. However, this means, percentage vice, only 3.7% are using the internet. J* RESEARCH FOCUS This paper aims to explore
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