As the internet has become a focus of attention and development in today's media landscape, the field of journalism sees as many changes as many other areas of work. It is important at this stage to clarify the potential and limitations the Internet holds as a medium. It is clear that such an evaluation is object to dramatic change, as we are currently on the verge of streaming media becoming a major issue on the agenda. Technically speaking, we are still experiencing serious limitations but it indicates the speed at which any evaluation need to be continuously reworked. The following presentation attempts to focus on more general issues of journalism online and online journalism.

Being a journalist, working with the web will definitely affect the way you research you material. This is the most common use of the World Wide Web. As a matter of speaking, there is little else to say about the potential for research, bot to point toward various pages online which might be on interest to the everyday journalist www.yahoo.com still provides a good entrance to many news services online. More links can be found in the links section.

Some publications or radio programs might experience a shift of their audience when deciding to make their program available online. Especially local radio stations might experience such a shift, when suddenly the international audience might outnumber the local audience online, whereas the onair program reaches the audience located within the footprint of the transmitter.

Such a shift might create problems as well as opportunities. In the case of an expensive approach towards the new medium, the Internet, an international profile with English speaking news and information feeds might help a station gain ground and subsequently reputation in the wider media world. Instead of just translating the program from old to new media, it might prove to be more efficient to establish an editorial staff that will develop the online presence and the new audience that comes with it.

Instead of using the Internet to promote your work to a wider audience, it might also be used to network between decentralized media initiatives. In the case of radio stations, normally transponder networks or dedicated long distance phone lines are being used to move content from one station to another. Today, the Internet has reached a technical sophistication that makes is possible to transmit audio material of re-broadcasting quality across the network. In some cases this has proven to be a cost effective and tactically valuable alternative to expensive solutions such as transponder networks.

The FRY based ANEM network of radio stations is a good example of such an effort. Linking local, independent radio stations across former Yugoslavia, ANEM managed to actually reach over 60% of the population.

The Belgrade based radio station B 92( now renamed B 292) also used the Internet to stream their radio content via the Internet outside of the country, to be up-linked to a satellite by London based BBC. This satellite signal would then be re-broadcasted by local radio stations across the Balkan region. To B 92 this was the only way to establish a satellite up-link, as the national legislation would require an up-link which was not granted by the government.

And-of course- The World Wide Web is increasingly used as the one and only media environment within which a publication is placed. Depending on the publication this make more or less sense. In the case of a highly specialized publication, the WWW might provide efficient environment within which editors can actually reach a larger audience. To that extent, the web can prove to be a cost efficient alternative to the usual distribution problems. Additionally, the production cost might prove to be substantially lower. In other cases, the web might be the only possible outlet, as in case of paper shortage or lack of frequencies for radio broadcasting.

But on a more realistic note, so far the web has not proven to be a reliable source of income. As there are no real 'sales' involved, the publication or online radio program is competing with a large number of free services and will eventually need to seek additional income through advertisement or the selling subscription.