ine'."

5.2. Future Trends for the On-Line Press

A new type of press has been born. In an article of the French daily newspaper
Liberation of March 21, 1997, Laurent Mauriac underlined the fact that February
28, 1997, was an important date in the history of press, journalism and the
Internet. At 3.15 PM, one of the ten U.S. main daily newspapers, the Dallas
Morning News, gave an exclusive on its website: Timothy McVeigh, the main
suspect in the Oklahoma City bomb attack, just admitted he was guilty of this
crime. Suddenly, the relationship between the on-line issue and the paper issue
were inverted - for the first time, an exclusive piece of news was not given by
a paper issue but by an on-line issue.

Less than one year later, the new mechanism was running fine. Pierre Briancon,
another journalist of Liberation, explained in an article of January 30, 1998,
that the Bill Clinton-Monica Lewinsky scandal (about the sexual relationship
between the president of the United States and a White House intern) was "the
first main political event all the details of which are instantaneously
reproduced on the Web". Most of the main media in the world were running a
special web page or report on this matter. "For the first time, the Web appears
as a direct and violent competitor, not only of newspapers - handicapped by
their periodicity - but also of radios or televisions."

As these two examples show, the introduction of the Web in the press, and vice
versa, created a new type of press on-line, which offers almost instantaneous
information, or in any case much quicker than that given by TV and radio. The
information can also be much more comprehensive thanks to the hyperlinks leading
to other information sources and documents.

However, as was made clear particularly during the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal,
cyberjournalists need a professional code of ethics. In an interview given to
the German multimedia magazine Com! in March 1998, Hermann Meyn, president of
the Federation of German Journalists (Deutscher Journalisten Verband - DJV)
showed the necessity for such a code because the flood of information is much
more rapid on the Internet than in the classic media, and rumors and false news
spread much more quickly. National laws would not be enough to fight against
this tendency on the Internet which is a worldwide computer network. A
professional code of ethics for journalists would be much more effective.

Another important p