The internet – specifically its graphic interface, the world wide web – has had a major impact on all levels of (information) societies throughout the world. Specifically for journalism as it is practiced online, we can now identify the effect that this has had on the profession and its culture(s). This article defines four particular types of online journalism and discusses them in terms of key characteristics of online publishing – hypertextuality, interactivity, multimediality – and considers the current and potential impacts that these online journalisms can have on the ways in which one can define journalism as it functions in elective democracies worldwide. It is
argued that the application of particular online characteristics not only has consequences for the type of journalism produced on the web, but that these characteristics and online journalism indeed connect to broader and more profound changes and redefinitions of professional journalism and its (news) culture as a whole.

The article examines the interactive uses of journalism, focusing on the changes brought by new communication technology in the everyday news media uses of young Finns. The study is based on a survey and in-depth interviews. The results indicate that even though young Finns have easy access to new communication technology, journalism is still predominantly used via television and printed newspapers. While nearly all subjects followed news regularly, a fifth of the respondents had taken advantage of participatory activities offered by the news media. Consequently, technology alone does not seem to alter news practices. The interactive usage of journalism thus seems to be individualized entertainment for the majority of the young people that were studied, and only for few was it a platform for active citizenship. The everyday practices of using journalism via new media point towards heterogeneous activity and the conflicting meanings given to them.

Changes in the information society, especially the rise of blogs, have refocused attention on
questions of media modality, source identification, and motivation in online environments.
We manipulate the structure of a blogger’s critique on a news story (global vs. interspersed)
and the partisan target of the blogger (Democrats vs. Republicans) in an experiment
embedded in an online survey. Our results support our expectations: The more difficult
story format decreases the ability of less motivated readers to correctly identify the source
of their information, without affecting the motivated. These effects of structure on source
identification are democratically consequential when people rely on blogs for facts about
public affairs without the proper cautionary caveats regarding the credibility of the source.