The goal is to fulfill the Internet s strength as a pull medium, as contrasted with a traditional push medium. Interactivity allows viewers to be part of the scene as news happens and get any slice of the story they choose. This democratic concept of news coverage, with its possibilities of distortion and selective bias, raises tough ethical issues. Traditional journalists tend to see so many drawbacks that some reject interactive news outright. But as the technology leaves the laboratories, it has to be dealt with, preferably by concerned, informed journalists.
New technology enhances the role of the journalist.
Not only do they have to sort through thorny ethical problems and work with engineers to solve them, but they have a new role on the Internet as helpful guides to viewers forward scouts and navigators through a new world of experience. News organizations that can gain the public s trust will earn the biggest audience. Highly digitized news will be no different, except complex tools will require reporters, producers and directors to be even more diligent. The selective nature of new technology means that images easily get out of synch with reality. In the digital world, data is sorted, metered, chopped and channeled.