Watching a broadcast newscast is like being a passenger in a car on a road trip. You can get a glimpse at cool billboards and buildings from the window, but if you want to stop and explore, you are out of luck.
When you watch a newscast, all of the news of the day is shrunk down to a thirty minute "trip" of one or two-minute packages with a (sometimes too) concise explanation of the skeleton of a story. If you want more information, you are left to figure out another way to answer any questions the story leaves you asking. It's like passing by an amusement park on the highway. The magnificent roller coasters hook you, but they all too soon passes into the horizon before you can say "are we there yet?"
The web takes you out of the passenger seat and makes you the driver. With side dishes, what we have been experimenting with on the KUJH website a television website can allow the viewer to take a rest stop and find out more.
The website can serve as a roadmap that can guide you off the highway and into the amusement park, so you get a closer look to see what you may have missed. Or it can take you through the back roads, allow you to travel around and encounter more than just the rides, if you so choose.
Convergence helps make a newscast not a destination, but a journey. With links, added photos, extra video or audio, graphs, tables, and whatever other added interactive feature that web producers can concoct, web journalism can augment a typical newscast into a intense expedition on the information superhighway (sorry I had to use it).
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