ABSTRACT
In South America women ran more than half of the new online news sites that had developed in recent years and increasingly they pursued the more challenging story. News organizations resisted spending money because advertising Web sales were disappointing. Newspapers were also reluctant because news that had been sold at newsstands and through home delivery was now being given away free on the Web. One of the major developments of the internet has been the establishment of news aggregators, sites that collect news from other sites and package it in a form requested by the reader. The social media site combined reports from federal agencies, news organizations including the Weather Channel, along with posts from local residents who included photos of the flooding and where rescues still needed to be carried out. Blogs are one of the great new journalistic tools with an exasperating range of pluses and minuses. They are so easy to begin and so difficult to sustain.
