ABSTRACT
The media was chosen for study because it was felt that journalists, as information seekers and packagers par excellence, should be in the advance guard of Internet users and setting a hot pace. Probably the questionnaire survey of 50 randomly selected Times journalists provides the most statistically representative picture of Internet use. A good picture of the poverty of regional journalist Internet use emerged from group interviews that were conducted with 24 trainee journalists from various local and regional newspapers. Of the 52 people interviewed at The Guardian/Observer 68% were Internet users. There were, however, three groups of people who patently used the Internet quite extensively: student journalists, media librarians, who were obviously taking up the slack in journalists’ use of the Internet and, unsurprisingly, the New Media lab journalists. Plying their trade, as it were, on the Internet, it is not surprising that 93% of the New Media journalists we interviewed fully utilised its information retrieval and communication properties.
