On Ethos

The online newspaper’s ethos is an interesting one (as defined in On Rhetoric 1.2.4). Both online versions of traditional papers and online-only newspapers take their authority from essentially the same place that traditional newspapers do: the history of journalism in America. But online-only newspapers also seem to take their authority from the existence of the Internet itself, which allows their very existence. The Internet allows for a multivocality that is reproduced in these websites, not necessarily on an individual level, but taken as a whole genre of website: anyone can create a newspaper online and use the authority given to newspapers to disseminate their own facts about events.