Das utopias à realidade: um olhar sobre duas décadas de ciberjornalismo

Abstract

The arrival of the Internet to Portugal and the birth of online journalism have been first received with a feeling of strangeness and, soon after, of euphoria. The new technology brought promises of endless new possibilities for the world in general and for journalism in particular. It was a "revolution", comparable to the invention of printing by Gutenberg. The earlier online journalism utopias predicted major changes in media companies and the production of a contextualized, hypermedia, interactive, immersive, instantaneous, guiding, converged, multiplatform online journalism. Two decades later, where do we stand? Some predictions were, at least partially, fulfilled, but many utopias fell by the wayside. Over time, the reality of firms, media market, audiences, advertising and journalists themselves overshadowed some of the most optimistic initial projections. The crisis of news media, most visible in recent years, has created conditions for the deepening of certain online journalism dystopias, that is, the antithesis of many of the scenarios envisioned initially.