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D. Rusch:
"The Online-Journalistic Article as "Extensive Audio-Visual Event"";
Ghrebh - revista brasileira de ciencias da communicacao e da culture e de teoria da midia, www.revista.cisc.org.br/ghrebh7 (2005), 7.

In 1995, Joshua Quittner, who has become aware of the narrative possibilities of the Internet, called for a brand new journalism in the online magazine Hotwired. Since then, his call has been heard and further propagated by more and more journalists as well as scientists (Meier 1999: 129; Neuberger 2000: 310; Wagner 1998: 210).

Following Quittners lead, my research deals with the narrative possibilities of web-composition (= "Web-Inszenierung"), focusing on the phenomenon of the multimodal and multi-media based (hyper-) text and the question how the semiotic and technical possibilities of the Internet can be used sensibly and effectively for online-journalistic article design so that information transferring and opinion building abilities of online-journalistic texts are optimized.

To answer this question, it is unavoidable to also take the user´s side into account, which I did by following Wolfgang Schweiger´s example and including the "uses-and-gratifications-approach" into my research perspective (Schweiger 2003: 294). The user-needs considered here correspond to a general understanding of the functions of journalistic media to inform, comment and entertain.

So, the main question of this article is: How can online-journalism use the possibilities of web-composition in such a way that the resulting articles are able to inform effectively, stimulate opinion building and are interesting to and enjoyed by their recipients? To make suggestions about how online-journalistic article design could be improved to better fulfill the afore mentioned user needs, the following questions have to be answered:

- What are the new requirements on journalistic storytelling that arise through the technical characteristics of the Internet?
- How can the possibilities of web-composition be used in such a way that they ensure maximum readability of texts and highest emotional satisfaction of the users?
- What steps have already been taken in this direction? (What kind of action has still to be taken?)