He suggests that carrying standards from the 'old world' into the new can provide the stability journalists need to deal effectively with an inherently unstable environment. With our ethical bearings in place, Bruce Garrison then takes us inside today's newsrooms, where 'technophobia' is yielding to a recognition of the computer's power as an information-gathering tool. Translating that recognition into widespread use of new technologies, however, is likely to take some time. Computer databases allow journalists to interact with information, tailoring it to their needs, much more easily than they could before. The theme of interactivity is picked up by our two other debates contributors, Elliot King and Vivien Marx.
King looks at how interactivity is redefining the relationship between news producers and consumers.
He concludes that although on-line media have the potential to draw the two into closer contact, that potential may be hard to realise without both an organisational and conceptual reconfiguration by the media of their own role. Mark Wheeler looks at the use of new communication technologies by Britain's Labour Party and how that use moulded coverage of the 1997 general election. His article clearly illuminates the potential of these tools, ostensibly agents of increased democratisation, to tighten control over political information. From the other side of the Atlantic, Richard Somerville and his colleagues investigate attitudes toward free speech in cyberspace, an issue at the heart of journalism in democratic nations. Their finding of a sharp division of opinion between those who favour unrestrained speech and those who prefer to control it, particularly to protect children, portends a continuing struggle over the issue of on-line content regulation.