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Book Review - A Journalist's Guide To The Internet
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Book Details Title: A Journalist's Guide to the Internet Author: Chistopher Callahan Publisher: Allyn and Bacon Year of Publication: 1999 Number of pages: 126 SYNOPSIS "This is not a computer book; it is a journalism book", writes Christopher Callahan in his book A Journalist's Guide to the Internet. Internet has touched our lives. And changed them in a big way. The print media today, is facing competition from new media. Journalists the world over have befriended technology, and made it an ally. A Journalist's Guide to the Internet is a practical handbook on the use of Internet, aimed at two audiences-college journalism students and professional reporters and editors. The book comprises 13 chapters. The first two chapters introduce the Internet to the reader. They cover the basic navigating tools and techniques and discuss the strategic use of Internet from a journalist's perspective. The following three chapters list the various resources on the Internet useful for journalists. Since reliability in professional journalism is a basic criterion, focus is on the credibility of information supplied by the text. The two subsequent chapters enlist electronic news publications available on the Net. The seventh chapter outlines various strategies for useful searching on the Internet. The eighth chapter informs the reader about how to build a system of Internet sites related to specific beats. The penultimate three chapters explore other areas of the Internet, like discussion groups and bulletin boards, and discuses their potential journalistic uses. The author, Chistopher Callahan, is assistant dean of the College of Journalism at University of Maryland at College Park. He is a specialist in political and governmental, investigative reporting, diversity issues in the newsroom and the use of Internet for journalists. BOOK REVIEW A Journalist's Guide to the Internet sets out to be a book about journalism and not about computers. And it does just that. The book can be summarized as a collection of useful web related resources for journalists with an explanation on how to utilize these resources. A Journalist's Guide to the Internet is written for a reporter newly introduced to the Internet. It covers only the basic operations of the Net. The text is clear and jargon-free. It is non-technical and methodical in its approach to the subject. Callahan provides a list of websites, discussion groups and bulletin boards with other potentially useful resources for journalists in his book A Journalist's Guide to the Internet. The reader gets a fair idea of the kind of information to look for in such directories. The author also provides detailed information on how to perform specific searches on the Internet and describes some popular search engines and their functions. A chapter in A Journalist's Guide to the Internet is dedicated to how a reporter can build a system of websites related to a particular beat. The author lists out various websites that can act as sources of information and help to save the reporter's time. A Journalist's Guide to the Internet is strewn will a lot of case studies involving the successful use of the Internet as a credible source of information. The book succeeds, to a large extent, in convincing the reader not to dismiss anything found on the Net as all right or all wrong. It helps wary journalists to reconsider the Internet as a valuable and cheap source of information by suggesting means of sifting through the Net and getting what you want out of it. No doubt, the information provided is useful, but it is not something an average regular user of the Internet would not know. Also, some of the links are to websites of American directories which hold relatively little relevance to Indian journalists. The advantage for a non-American reader is that the process of acquiring useful information from these websites is like that of any other directories. The emphasis the book places on validating the information found online and verifying the sources is appreciable. Callahan suggests various techniques for evaluating web site credibility and advises journalists to apply the strictest standards of accuracy to anything found on electronic services. I hope this review will help you. Feel free to email me with any comments or suggestions that you may have. Gary, Editor, QuikContent Services. BACK TO HOME PAGE |
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