ABSTRACT
This book is about television news, but any prospective or working journalist will probably also be using the web regularly anyway, for both research and for writing content. The Internet’s ever-increasing value and profound social and economic impact have established it as the central information tool in our time. Yet television journalists, at least until early 2000, saw the web only as another information tool rather than a medium in its own right. It was only with the first big media merger – when America Online (AOL) linked with Time Warner in 2000 – that business knew for sure that the Internet would dominate home and business information and communication. Sound and vision news, movies, the web, e-commerce and e-mail would all converge. The traditional media companies like Time Warner (which included CNN) were desperate to get a foothold on the Net. The Internet companies like AOL had the opposite problem of not having much content to put onto it. Such relationships, as business consultants would say, were a perfect fit.
