News

===Internet===
The early internet, known as [[ARPANET]], was controlled by the U.S. Department of Defense and used mostly by academics. It became available to a wider public with the release of the [[Netscape (browser)|Netscape browser]] in 1994.<ref>McNair, ''Cultural Chaos'' (2006), p. 118.</ref> At first, news websites were mostly archives of print publications.<ref>Allan, ''News Culture'' (2004), p. 173.</ref> An early [[online newspaper]] was the ''Electronic Telegraph'', published by ''[[The Daily Telegraph]]''.<ref name=Thompson /><ref>Shane Richmond, "[https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/6545788/Telegraph.co.uk-15-years-of-online-news.html Telegraph.co.uk: 15 years of online news]"; ''The Telegraph'', 11 November 2009.</ref> [[1994 Northridge earthquake|A 1994 earthquake in California]] was one of the first big stories to be reported online in real time.<ref name=Allan175>Allan, ''News Culture'' (2004), pp. 175–176.</ref> The new availability of web browsing made news sites accessible to more people.<ref name=Allan175 /> On the day of the [[Oklahoma City bombing]] in April 1995, people flocked to newsgroups and chatrooms to discuss the situation and share information. The ''Oklahoma City Daily'' posted news to its site within hours. Two of the only news sites capable of hosting images, the ''San Jose Mercury News'' and ''Time'' magazine, posted photographs of the scene.<ref name=Allan175 />

Quantitatively, the internet has massively expanded the sheer volume of news items available to one person. The speed of news flow to individuals has also reached a new plateau.<ref>McNair, ''Cultural Chaos'' (2006), pp. 1–2.</ref> This insurmountable flow of news can daunt people and cause [[information overload]]. [[Zbigniew Brzezinski]] called this period the "technetronic era", in which "global reality increasingly absorbs the individual, involves him, and even occasionally overwhelms him."<ref>Hachten, ''World News Prism'' (1996), p. 8.</ref>

In cases of government crackdowns or revolutions, the Internet has often become a major communication channel for news propagation; while it's a (relatively) simple act to shut down a newspaper, radio or television station, mobile devices such as smartphones and netbooks are much harder to detect and confiscate. The propagation of internet-capable mobile devices has also given rise to the [[citizen journalist]], who provide an additional perspective on unfolding events.