ONLINE JOURNALISM AND THE PROMISES OF NEW TECHNOLOGY A critical review and look ahead Steen Steensen The research on online journalism has been dominated by a discourse of technological innovation. The “success” of online journalism is often measured by to what degree it utilizes technological assets like interactivity, multimedia and hypertext. This paper critically examines the technologically oriented research on online journalism in the second decade of its existence. The aim is twofold: First, to investigate to what degree online journalism, as it is portrayed in empirical research, utilizes new technology to a greater extent than before. Second, the paper points to the limitations of the technologically oriented research and suggests alternative research approaches that to a greater extent might explain why online journalism develops as it does. KEYWORDS hypertext; interactivity; Internet technology; multimedia; online journalism Introduction Whenever new technology expected to play a major role in the evolution of media comes around, researchers, scholars, business executives and practitioners alike all participate in a game of revolution prophesying. Mosco (2004) argues that the entry of such new technologies always has been surrounded by myths about their revolutionary powers. The telephone, the radio, television and the computer were all surrounded by mythical pronouncements on how they would cause “the end of history, the end of geography and the end of politics” (2004, p. 13). Needless to say, these technological inventions did change the world dramatically, but not in such a quick and radical fashion the fortune-tellers seemed to believe. Similar myths dominated the introduction of the Internet, and the research into online journalism was not left untouched. The 1990s saw several publications predicting for instance “the end of journalism” (Bromley, 1997; Hardt, 1996) due to the implementation of digital technology, while others, like Pavlik (2001), were profoundly optimistic on behalf of the future of journalism in new media. According to Boczkowski (2004) and Domingo (2006), these first online journalism analysers were driven by technological determinism. Domingo argues that the research of online journalism the first decade of its existence was partly paralyzed by what he labels “utopias of online journalism” (2006, p. 54). These utopias were especially related to how