Searching the Internet: Journalism on the Web

On the basis of Guide to Effective Searching of the Internet prepared by Bright Planet and UC Berkeley library I have made a arbitrary list of free search engines (Yahoo!, Ask.com, Google, Google Scholar, and Msn.com) and conducted a search using a number of recommended procedures. My topic of interest was journalism on the web and I gradually narrowed the search:
- First, in scientific literature often used phrases such as “online journalism”, “web journalism”, “internet journalism”, “cyber-journalism” etc., therefore, I used the operator OR (“online journalism” OR “web journalism” OR “internet journalism” OR “cyber-journalism”).
- In the second step I narrowed the search on full scientific texts, therefore, I searched for pdf-files that are commonly used for documenting such literature (“online journalism” OR “web journalism” OR “internet journalism” OR “cyber-journalism” AND pdf).
- Third, because journalism on the web or online journalism to use the most common phrase is a broad subject I narrowed the interest to texts that deal with online journalism and changes of the newsroom by truncating words, using operator AND, and parentheses (“online journalism” OR “web journalism” OR “internet journalism” OR “cyber-journalism” AND pdf AND (chang* OR transform* newsroom*)).

Msn.com
1) First step search gave us over 1,760,000 results. First result was Journalism.co.uk, a site that deals with on a array of issues linked with journalism. The second result was a reperot of The project for Excellence in Journalism from 2006. Among top ten results were blogs dealing with online journalism, Wikipedia’s article dealing with the subject and sites of news organizations (i.e. Pbs.com).
2) The results and the number of them changed only slightly in regards to the first search. It did not offer a pdf-file in top results.
3) The results and the number of them changed only slightly in regards to the first and second search. Dominant results were blogs on online journalism, j-blogs and activist sites made by journalists.

Yahoo!
1) First step search gave us over 4,600,000 results. The first result was Online Journalism Review a site that evaluates happening in the field of online journalism and is sponsored by Yahoo!. The second result was Wikipedia’s article on the subject. The third result was Mark Deuze’s article Online Journalism: Modelling the First Generation of News Media on the World Wide Web from 2001 published in The First Monday. Journalism.co.uk, a site that deals with on a array of issues linked with journalism. The second result was a reperot of The project for Excellence in Journalism from 2006. Among top ten results were blogs dealing with online journalism and activist sites made by journalists.
2) The results changed and they were narrowed to 439,000. In the first ten results were among others a survey on the roles of journalists in online newsrooms conducted as part of the Project for Excellence in Journalism and a complete Handbook of Independent Journalism, written by Deborah Potter, the executive director of NewsLab.
3) The results changed and they were narrowed to 1,390. Among top results was a number of pdf-files on online journalism and changing newsrooms: for example a report from the symposium held at the University of Texas, articles from Nieman Reports, and reviews made by professionals from couple of news organizations. Among top results were some j-blogs and educational blogs.

Ask.com
1) The first search gave 11,190,000 results. Among top results were among others Online Journalism Review a site that evaluates happening in the field of online journalism, Poynter.org that “helps journalists do their jobs better and to serve their communities”, and Journalism.org that conducts the Project for Excellence in Journalism. Other top sites were blogs and sites dealing with online journalism.
2) The results and the number of them changed only slightly in regards to the first search. It did not offer a pdf-file in top results.
3) The results and the number of them changed only slightly in regards to the first and second search.

Google.com
1) The first search offered 595,000 results. Among top sites were almost exclusively collective sites and blogs made by journalists on the subject of online journalism (i.e. Journalism.org, Poynter.org, Journalism.co.uk).
2) The number of results narrowed to 56,000, but among top sites were almost exclusively collective sites and blogs made by journalists on the subject of online journalism. Less than a handful of pdf-files that could hardly be useful for serious insight into the matter of journalism on the web.
3) The number of results narrowed to thirty. Among top results still dominated blogs and collective sites made by journalists. Two of the results were interesting and worth checking them out: Nisar Keshvani’s PhD titled Integrated Newsroom, and article titled Interactive Options in Online Journalism: A Content Analysis of 100 U.S. Newspapers, written by Tanjev Schultz from the Institute for Intercultural and International Studies at the University of Bremen.

Scholar.google.com
1) The first search gave 2,370 results. You get an insight in what was written by the academia on the subject of journalism on the web, the most important authors, and issues regarding the matter. However, you are only offered abstracts of articles or first pages of related books, no full text documents were among top results. Therefore, the results could be used as guidelines for further search on literature databases (i.e. Routledge online and Sage online) through universities’ libraries or for buying books on online book stores.
2) The number of results fell to 1,500 and a number of complete texts were offered among top results as pdf-files on a number of issues of online journalism – however, there texts were merely research reports by more or less internationally unknown authors. Despite this the readings are interesting and could be worth checking out.
3) The third search narrowed the results to 19. Similarly to the second search the sites offered literature written by more or less internationally unknown authors concentrated on specific national contexts. Through this prism they could be worth checking out.