The big newspapers published online, limited hypertextuality

Talking about the Internet. It certainly set information free from time and space tyranny. Yet there is much to do in Italy to rise online journalism from the schemes of paper news spreading, as well as the reader from routine. 

"The Internet changes many things – Vittorio Roidi wrote in his book La fabbrica delle notizie – It changes relationships, both private and business ones. It modifies journalistic communication: plenty of information reaches our computer monitors, close to printed newspapers or magazines, and TV news. The boundaries of space disappear, and everyone can mould his own journal, deciding what's interesting. We're the ones who decide, without being submitted to anyone else's choices."

How do the big Italian online networks, such as La Repubblica and il Corriere della Sera, respond to the reader's freedom ambitions? Hypertextuality is a must.

 

It deals with the non-linear arrangement of many information units, so to give users a free choice of path, through links among the several sections (nodes oppure knots, N.d.T.) which constitute the hypertext itself. Non-linearity, thus, but free access and a variable information hierarchy.

The web journalism derives from the paper news spreading, and both shared the same professional ground for a long time. The first attempts to use the web for news editing basically consisted in the online version of the newspapers pages, but soon came a day when the online journalism took a way of its own, and the websites of the most read headings have been enriched with contents and reports which were thought for the digital versions only.

Yet, a step forward is necessary. Still today, working in the web division of big newspapers sites, is considered a sort of punishment, and pages are often set as a simplification of their paper versions. A kind of summary, though sometimes enriched with links and videos. Therefore no possibility is given to actually navigate from a page of La Repubblica online. No way. The reader is bound to one newspaper's section, and no projection towards external items can be imagined.

"The right to be aware of every possible interaction – Ilaria Bonomi wrote in her l'italiano giornalistico. Dall'inizio del '900 ai quotidiani online – is an essential requirement today, for every average Internet user, even if it's a relatively recent conquest, and it's linked to the web evolution towards a contextual structure." Maybe this is true, but not everybody realized it.

Marco de' Francesco