How can any industry which regularly pulls Doonesbury strips for being too controversial possibly hope to survive online?
For millions of Americans, especially young ones, newspapers have never played a significant role. That's why it's sometimes hard to know, recall, or even imagine that there's almost no media experience sweeter - at the right time, in the right place, with the proper accessories - than poring over a good newspaper. In the quiet morning, with a cup of coffee - so long as you haven't yet turned on the TV, listened to the radio, or checked in online - it's as comfortable and personal as information gets.
Delivered to your door daily, newspapers are silent, highly portable, require neither power source nor arcane commands, and don't crash or get infected. They can be stored for days at no cost and consumed over time in small, digestible quantities. They can also be used to line trash cans and train pets. They're recyclable. At their best, they have been fearless, informative, and heroic - exposing corrupt practices and crooked politicians, delving into health care and other complex issues. They can be deliciously quirky, useful, even provocative - filled with idiosyncratic issues and voices.
They're under siege, of course. Newspapers have been foundering for decades, their readers aging, their revenues declining, their circulation sinking, their sense of mission fragmented in a world where the fate of presidents is slugged out on MTV, Donahue, and Larry King Live. Television has stolen much of their news, magazines their advertisers and best writers, cable many of their younger readers. And the digital revolution has pushed them still closer to the wall, unleashing a vigorous flow of news, commentary, and commerce to millions and millions of people. CompuServe and CNN ensure that newspapers are stale before they're tossed on the trucks. With the possible exception of the comics, everything a newspaper used to do somebody else is doing more quickly, more attractively, more efficiently, and in a more interesting and unfettered way.
The newspaper industry has never liked change, viewing it rather the way a Temperance Lady viewed speakeasies. For a long time, papers have demonstrated an unerring instinct for making the wrong move at the wrong time. At heart, newspapers are reluctant to change because of their ingrained belief that they are the superior, serious, worthwhile medium, while things electronic are trivial or faddish.
Over the past decade, newspapers have made almost every kind of radical move except transforming themselves. It's as if they've considered every possible option but the most urgent - change. Times Mirror Co., publishers of the Los Angeles Times, bought newspapers, magazines, cable systems, and TV stations. Recently, the company appeared to be returning to its printed roots, selling off its cable properties a year after selling its TV stations.
That makes newspapers the biggest and saddest losers in the information revolution. With the possible exception of network-TV newscasts, papers are now our least hip medium, relentlessly one-way, non-interactive, and smug. We all know the formula: Plopped on the doorstep once a day. Breaking national and international news up front, local news next, stories broken up and jumping inside. Grainy, mostly black-and-white photos. Culture, features, TV, listings, recipes, and advice columns in the back. Stentorian voices on the editorial page. Take it or leave it, and if you don't like it, write us a letter.
But the growing millions of people sending and receiving news and their opinions of it to one another via modem is another story. Digital news differs radically from other media. No other medium has ever given individual people such an engaged role in the movement of information and opinion or such a proprietary interest in the medium itself. The computer news culture fosters a sense of kinship, ownership, and participation that has never existed in commercial media.
When in January 1994 a Prodigy subscriber used his wireless modem to flash news of the LA earthquake to the Net well before CNN or the Associated Press could report it, a new news medium was born. Within minutes, Prodigy and other BBSes had set up topics and conferences to relay information, pinpoint the quake location, notify distant relatives, and even - in some cases - organize rescues. No information structure has ever been able to do anything remotely like it.
Meanwhile, after years of newspapers' ignoring computers or relegating them to the far corners of the business sections, you can't pick up a paper any longer without reading the words e-mail, Internet, or cyberspace. The media, burned so often by techno-hype, are belatedly realizing that this time it's not all fantasy.
You can practically hear them shrieking "OK, we get it!" So-called electronic publishing is the hottest thing in newspaper publishing since cold type, and one of the last great hopes for a reeling industry that is trying to preserve a vital role for itself.
One of the best arenas in which to watch the newspaper and computer cultures collide is America Online, where much of the nation's elite traditional media is scrambling to catch the train. There, side by side, two profoundly different information structures clunk into one another, new next to old, diverse next to homogeneous, Washington pundits one icon away from Smashing Pumpkins fans, the powerful few alongside the voluble and suddenly empowered many.
The Newsstand on America Online now offers more than 35 newspapers and magazines, one of the first and best known being the San Jose Mercury News's pioneering Mercury Center, launched last year. Among the others on AOL: Time, USA Today, The New York Times, The New Republic, Road & Track, Wired, National Geographic.
The online explosion has caught newspaper publishers' attention, and what's left of their imaginations, blasting them off their self-important butts. This is where they are making their stand, haunted by the ghosts of cathode-ray tubes past. This time, publishers say, they're not going to be left behind, cut out of all those profits, isolated from young markets, watching their influence erode.
In April, the chair of the Tribune Company in Chicago, citing the growth of online services and CD-ROM and the digitalization of commercial communications, announced to the Newspaper Association of America that "it's easy to make the case that over the last 12 months there has been an unprecedented movement that will profoundly change the industry." His sense of timing may have been off - lots of people have known about this "movement" for far longer than 12 months - but it is pretty simple to make the case: papers are going online.
But watching sober, proper newspapers online stirs only one image: that of Lawrence Welk trying to dance at a rap concert. Online newspapers are unnatural, even silly. There's too much baggage to carry, too much history to get past. They never look comfortable, except on some of the odd community message boards, when the paper ends up offering just another BBS, instead of a reinvention of itself.
The San Jose Mercury News has made the biggest and, by most accounts, the best-known newspaper online effort so far, with its Mercury Center on AOL. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution's effort, Access Atlanta, appeared on Prodigy in March, free to subscribers for a month. The New York Times showed up on AOL in early June with a surprisingly un-newsy service, @times, that primarily offers reviews, listings, and message boards on the day's arts and entertainment. There are no live chat areas. @times was put together by the business side of the paper, with no journalists, columnists, or editors in evidence in its early weeks (it later issued an online apology for its lack of response and promised that Times staffers would soon get up to speed). Though hundreds of users tried to message @times and many asked for e-mail addresses for reporters, there was no one for them to talk to. Users could write letters to @times, but not to the newspaper through the service. There was very little interactivity of any sort.
The Times is partly hamstrung by the fact that it can't offer most of its past articles and reviews, having sold its electronic archival rights to Mead Data Central's Nexis a decade ago, when most of the media thought computer users were credit card thieves and national security risks.
The Washington Post also plans to go electronic, initially for IBM-compatibles, using online technology, created by Ziff-Davis Interactive, that has so far been greeted with an enthusiastic buzz. The Post Company's Digital Ink subsidiary will offer many of the same visual elements as its printed paper - including Post logos, photos, and graphics - as well as e-mail, online conversation, advertising, calendars, and other listings.
The San Francisco Chronicle and the San Francisco Examiner are also about to join the online rush, with an online service (called the Gate) that provides news summaries, electronic mail, and access to the Internet. The Los Angeles Times is going online with Pacific Telesis. The Associated Press and United Press International already offer online news reports, as do many specialized financial, technical, scientific, computer, and trade publications. Newspaper analysts predict that by the end of this year, nearly 3,000 papers will offer some electronic or interactive services.
And though it's not exactly a newspaper, there will be lots of news on Apple's much anticipated eWorld, a user-friendly information and messaging service set up structurally and graphically as an electronic village.
The arrival of such media heavyweights means that journalism has already reached a critical mass online. There seems no turning back now.
The San Jose Mercury News project, being one of the first, is also one of the most monitored. In business terms, Merc Center has been disappointing: it's had a tough time attracting subscribers, and the program's designers say readers have had trouble grasping some of its services. The 6,200 subscribers who have signed on to America Online specifically through the Merc Center since its May l993 debut represent less than 20 percent of America Online's 35,000 subscribers in the San Francisco Bay area, and less than 2 percent of the Mercury News's 290,000 daily circulation. But lots of new media start small and then build.
Last fall, Merc Center added a service that allows readers without computers to punch in codes to obtain information by fax. Subscribers pay fees of US$2.95 for the phone and fax service and $9.95 a month for the computer service that is part of AOL, which allows them to read the news via computer as it appears in the printed paper or use codes to call up information that's been edited out. Subscribers are encouraged to use bulletin boards and electronic mailboxes to communicate with the staff.
The paper's President and Executive Editor Robert Ingle certainly gets the picture: "Our communication historically has been: 'We print it. You read it,'" he told The New York Times in February. "This changes everything."
But does it? And should it?
So far, at least, online papers don't work commercially or conceptually. With few exceptions they seem to be just what they are, expensive hedges against onrushing technology with little rationale of their own. They take away what's best about reading a paper and don't offer what's best about being online. Online papers like Merc Center at least represent good-faith but primitive and expensive efforts to grapple with new realities. @times seems far more arrogant with its disregard for real interactivity, for any participation in the process by anyone other than The New York Times itself.
Online papers pretend to be seeking and absorbing feedback, but actually offer the illusion of interactivity without the reality, the pretense of democratic discussion without yielding a drop of power. The papers seem careful about reading and responding to their e-mail, but in the same pro forma way they thank readers for writing letters. They dangle the notion that they are now really listening, but that's mostly just a tease - the media equivalent of the politically correct pose. The real power, as always, lies not in online exchanges but in daily story conferences among a few editors who don't read e-mail. In fact, the familiar newspaper model lurks behind every icon: You can write us as many letters as you want, in a faster way than before, and we'll read them. But we're still going to decide what's important, and then we'll tell you. And we'll do it in a format that's even less pleasant, portable, and convenient than the paper itself.
To read the San Jose Mercury News or any other newspaper at home or work, you have only to spread it over your desk and read what catches your eye or intrigues you.
To read the Mercury News online, you have to go to your computer, turn it on, log onto AOL, go to the Newsstand on AOL, and click on the San Jose Mercury News line. When it opens on a larger Mercury Center graphic box, you choose from one of eight different elements and departments - In The News, Advertising, Entertainment, Bay Area Living, Sports, Business, Communication, News Library. A code text search permits readers of the paper to input special codes from the actual newspaper itself to call up stories or learn more about them. It's an interesting effort to provide an additional news dimension, but it seems a pointless one. If this information wasn't important enough to be printed in the paper, why should we pay to retrieve it? That's the point of a newspaper, after all - to filter the worthwhile information, then print it.
Users can also call up that day's paper - the front page, national and international news sections, local and state coverage, editorial and commentary, business, sports, and living. They can talk to the Mercury News by sending messages or communicate directly with the Mercury News library to search any day's paper.
But there is little the Mercury News offers online that AOL couldn't offer itself. The best thing about Merc Center - the community and special interest message boards, the chats with auto editor Matt Nauman or California Governor Pete Wilson - could also be provided in a non-newspaper context and, in fact, are at the heart of the computer bulletin boards that preceded online papers.
Reading a newspaper online is difficult, cumbersome, and time consuming. There is none of the feel of scanning a story, turning pages for more, skipping easily back to the beginning. The impact of seeing a picture, headline, caption, and some text in one sweep is completely lost. With news glimpsed only in fragments and short scrolls, the sense of what the paper thinks is important disappears. You can't look at a paper's front page to absorb some sense, however limited, of the shape your town, city, or world is in. You can't skip through a review for the paragraph that tells you whether to see the movie or not or skim through movie listings for show times. Much of what still works about a paper - convenience, visual freedom, a sense of priorities, a personal experience - is gone. Online, papers throw away what makes them special.
The online culture is as different as it's possible to be from the print press tradition. Outspoken and informal, it is continuously available, not delivered once a day. It is so diverse as to be undefinable, a home to scientists, hackers, pet owners, quilters, swingers, teenagers, and homemakers. Online, there is the sense of perpetual conflict, discovery, sudden friendship, occasional hostility, great intensity, lots of business being transacted, the feeling of clacking through your own world while whole unseen galaxies rush above and below you. You log on never quite knowing what discussion or argument you'll be drawn into, which new people you'll meet, or who from your past will mystically appear. The experience bears no relationship to reading a newspaper. In fact, one of the major selling points of a paper is its organizational and informational predictability. The weather, sports, and TV listings are always in the same place, or ought to be.
It doesn't have to work this way. These two media can coexist and complement one another.
One of the more interesting electronic publishing projects, a pointed contrast to the earnest but uninspiring Merc Center or the remote @times, is Time magazine's aggressive experiment on AOL. It's odd that Time, for years one of journalism's leading symbols of imperiousness and conservatism, seems to have grasped the real potential of interactivity better than almost anybody else.
To read Time online and offline is to sense that the new information culture is actually changing the magazine. Rather than simply shoveling Time online, the magazine's editors and writers have gone to considerable lengths and expense to understand and adapt to it.
For one thing, Time now covers new media better than its competitors. Not too long ago, it wouldn't have approved much of the freewheeling online communication style, complete with flaming, dirty words, and diverse opinions. Once it would have published a cover story just like Newsweek's silly "Men, Women and Computers" (in the May 16, 1994 issue), which stereotyped computer men as macho dirtballs and women as nurturing, delicate cyber-moms. Now, it wouldn't. Time Online's issues boards on AOL have become vigorous and democratic civic forums, with thousands of subscribers slugging it out around the clock about everything from Clinton's sex life to gays in the military. Anyone interested in journalistic accountability should drop by to watch Time's once-Olympian editors receive electronic drubbings from irate members of the National Rifle Association, retirees furious about coverage of entitlement programs, devout Catholics defending the Vatican's latest pronouncement.
One such thumping occurred following publication of the June 27, 1994 issue of the magazine. Time's Managing Editor Jim Gaines went online to face a record number of visitors - Time officials estimated the number to be at least 70,000 - including many outraged readers demanding to know why the magazine had altered a photograph of O.J. Simpson to make the picture appear darker than it was. The notion that a Time managing editor would face so many readers live is the media equivalent of cows learning how to fly.
If San Jose Mercury News executives find the results of some of Merc Center's services disappointing, Time's are thrilled with Time Online. It appears designed not to replace the magazine or plop it into a different format, but to gain a toehold in cyberspace and even absorb some of its values.
From the start, Time seemed to grasp that online communications required a different ethic than a "Letters To The Editor" column, perhaps partly because Time had hired as consulting editor Tom Mandel, a professional futurist and a longtime member of the Well, and chosen Senior Writer Philip Elmer-DeWitt, who covers the digital world, as its editorial guiding force. The pair seems to have brought with them the right combination of the values and traditions of both journalism and the Net. Mandel, whose own online style is to be ubiquitous and sometimes aggressive, understands that real interactivity transcends Feedback icons.
Time also seemed to grasp online users' resistance to the blatant commercializing that dominated Prodigy. The magazine avoided advertising initially, but has inevitably added a product information icon to its AOL menu. Even there, though, the magazine seems to at least be conscious of the differences in culture - magazine readers expect blatant advertising but computer users don't.
But the more telling impact of Time's online experiment is the intense, sometimes furious back-and-forth between Time Online subscribers and Time's writers and editors. Discussions in Time Online have also influenced stories in the magazine, Mandel said.
Time has gained only a handful of new subscribers from its online project and doesn't expect many. But it has gained more than a foothold online: it has become a part of the culture.
Newspapers, by contrast, seem to have missed the real lesson of the past half-century. Their mistake wasn't that they didn't invest in television or put their stories on screens, it was that they refused to make any of the changes that the rise of television should have mandated.
TV meant that breaking news could be reported quickly, colorfully, and - eventually - live. Live TV supplanted the historic function of the journalist. Cable TV meant a whole new medium with the time and room to present breaking and political news, entertainment news, live trial coverage. Computers meant that millions of people could flash the news to one another. All of these changes have given newspapers a diminished role in the presentation of news.
But the explosion of new media needn't eliminate the traditional journalistic print function. Quite the opposite, it could make newspapers more vital, necessary, and useful than ever.
The more complicated the gadgets become, and the more new media mushroom, the more we need what newspapers have always been - gatekeepers and wellheads, discussion leaders on politics and public policy questions, distributors of horoscopes, sports listings, and comics. They're not going to have a monopoly any more, and they don't get to tell us only what they think we should know. They'll have to chuck the stern schoolmarm's voice. They'll also have to really listen to us, not just pretend.
If newspapers could do with more interactivity, they might not need as much as bulletin boards offer. Everybody can't be talking to everyone at the same time. We need distinct voices standing back, offering us detached versions of the best truth they can find in the most factual way. We need fair-minded if less arrogant fact-gatherers and opinion-makers to help us sort through the political, social, and cultural issues we care about but need help in comprehending.
We need something very close to what a good newspaper is but with a different ideology and ethic: a medium that gives its consumers nearly as much power as its reporters and editors have. A medium that isn't afraid of unfettered discussions, intense passions, and unashamed opinion. A medium that recognizes we've already heard the headlines a dozen times.
Online publishing seems to reinforce the idea that newspapers should look to the past, not the future, for help in figuring out how to respond to all this competition and pressure. What newspapers need to change isn't the delivery technology - it's the content of their papers. Even if they get all interactive and smart about going online, it's a marginal solution to a fundamental problem, and a diversion of resources that could be put to much wiser use.
The San Francisco Chronicle is never going to beat the Well at its own game anymore than the Well could become a successful print daily, nor should it. Online services provide breaking news, are intrinsically interactive, and know much more about computers and technology.
Newspapers might begin to think about reversing their long-standing priorities, recognizing that everyone with electricity has access to more breaking news than they provide, faster than they provide it. They should, at last, accept that there is little of significance they get to tell us for the first time. They should stop hiding that fact and begin taking advantage of it. What they can do is explain news, analyze it, dig into the details and opinions, capture people and stories in vivid writing - all in greater depth than other media. They should get about the business of doing so.
Newspapers remain one of the few elements of modern media that refuse to bid for talent. As a result, they've long ceded many of their best writers and editors to publishing or magazines. Newspapers now have little original or distinctive writing: when newspaper reporters do have something extraordinary to say, they are often forced to go outside their medium to give their stories the treatment they merit and to gain full impact. Papers ought to reclaim this territory, seeking out provocative writers, giving them freedom, paying to keep them.
And the newspaper industry's relentless alienation of the young is the corporate equivalent of a scandal. Big city papers have almost no young staffers, now that it takes years to work through elaborate hiring structures and rigorous trials to get to urban metro desks. In addition, papers have trashed almost every significant part of youth culture for decades - from rock to radio to TV to rap and videogames - portraying each as stupid, violence-inducing, and dangerous. Hackers were mostly portrayed as weirdos while newspapers dozed through the arrival of another new medium that the nerds were piecing together in basements and bedrooms.
Newspaper publishers then hold regular conventions at which they wring their hands in bewilderment at the loss of younger readers and despair even more at those lost advertising dollars. Kids' tastes are no great mystery, not to cable TV or to a whole new generation of magazines. The young are busy and mobile. They like their media with attitude and lots of point-of-view. They especially like media that is full of informality and self-mockery - the much reviled Beavis & Butt-head being a classic example. Interactive media, from Nintendo to computer games to call-in talk shows - even channel zapping - is not a futuristic notion but the only kind of media they know, the kind they patronize and expect.
There's more.
Real investigative reporting, something few other media can do as effectively as newspapers, has almost vanished from mainstream media. Op-Ed pages are almost universally soporific. Papers are still astonishingly primitive graphically, many still running black-and-white photographs 24 hours after we saw the real events live and in color. Papers have clearly lost touch with much of the public on issues as diverse as race, crime, and political coverage. A Gallup Poll found that journalism ranks far below banks and cops in terms of public confidence - and that the number of people who rate journalists highly in terms of ethics and honesty has dropped from an already dismal 31 percent in l985 to 22 percent in l993.
The institutions of journalism seem in desperate need of some mechanism for re-connecting with an alienated public, and they needn't transform themselves into online publications to do it. An e-mail address on every reporter's stories would help. And gain journalists countless news sources as well.
If newspapers are going to invest heavily in anything, perhaps it ought to be in younger, more talented, more diverse staffs. The newspaper industry fails to take into account the dreary toll corporatization and chain ownership - the great fears of online users - have taken on newspapers' voice, vibrancy, and relevance. Founded by hell-raisers, papers too often have been cautious, tepid, and pompous. A century ago, newspapers were markedly more opinionated, fractious, and provocative than the corporate chain-produced dailies of today. Newspapers are drunk on information highway coverage and gee-whiz stories about the Internet, and their readers have to be overdosing.
There's more to come.
Roger Fidler, director of new media development for Knight-Ridder, told the Newspapers and Telecommunications Opportunities conference last year that he's working on yet another futuristic fantasy: an electronic publication combining the traditional look of a paper with full-motion, full-color video and sound on a portable notebook-sized display. Newspapers somehow never seem at home with techno-hype or -fantasies. It's not in their history or tradition, not a natural part of their culture. They have always been at their finest rooting out, shaping, and helping us define the great issues of the day. And writing about and mirroring our lives closer to home.
Maybe Fidler's tablet will work and help papers finally catch up. But it's hard to see why we need it or why Knight-Ridder wouldn't be better off hiring a couple of hundred bright young reporters instead. The answers to newspapers' problems might be much closer to home and much simpler.
"People have not stopped reading newspapers because of the latest high-tech gadgets," said Peter Thieriot, president of The Chronicle Publishing Company's newspaper division last year. "People have stopped reading newspapers because newspapers became less relevant."
