Annotative Reporting and Open-source Journalism

Now that we are familiar with hypertextuality, interactivity and multimediality, and the way they change the character of the text it is time to discuss the way these characteristics can be utilised to give the reader (user), and society in general, more than what they get from print or broadcast journalism. The two main ways of doing this are: annotative reporting and opensource journalism. The terms hyperadaptive news and participatory journalism are also sometimes used. Annotative Reporting According to the Concise Oxford English Dictionary , to ‘annotate’ is to “add notes to (a text or diagram) giving explanation or comment”. Therefore, this word and its derivative, ‘annotative’, presuppose the existence of other texts. In the case of online journalism, these other texts are the immense and ever-growing number of web pages and databases on every conceivable subject that are available on the internet. Deuze notes that the term ‘annotative reporting’ was coined in the mid-1990s when media commentators realised that since news sites constituted a very small fraction of all existing sites, these were far from being the only sources of information for the public. They saw that in the new situation, the reporter's role would have to evolve beyond the traditional one of a mere provider of information to that of a facilitator of interactive media environments in which readers (users) would construct their own ‘news’ from material present on the net with the help of hyperlinks.