We interrupt our chronicle of the Virtuous Reality tour to bring you this special report from cyberspace. The Dallas Morning News made media history Friday, by being one of the first mainstream news organizations to finally figure out how to use, rather than wring their hands over, the World Wide Web.
When the respected publication, on everybody's annual Top 10 Newspapers in America list, decided to break its story about suspected Oklahoma bomber Timothy McVeigh's reported jailhouse confession on its Web site, rather than in its next-up Saturday editions, journalism changed.
So did the raging civil war between old and new media.
"We put the story on the Web site," explained News executive Ralph Langer on the site, "because it was, in our view, extraordinarily important, and we got the story finished [Friday] afternoon and we felt we ought to publish, so we published."
The accuracy of the story was angrily challenged by McVeigh's lawyers, who said it was an irresponsible hoax. The paper insisted it was accurate. Although the paper's editors denied it, there was also speculation that the Morning News published the McVeigh story on the Web site in part to preclude any possible legal challenges or prior restraint on publication from the judge trying the case.
For nearly two decades, the mortal battle between new and old media has haunted journalism. In the past few months - particularly last Friday - we've been confronted with yet another new information reality - a middle media, where old and new fuse. In the best of all possible worlds, the freedom and interactivity of the Internet would work hand in hand with the fact-driven, somewhat filtered ethic of journalism practiced at its best. In the world of the Net, there is the dread possibility that mainstream media will bring along with it the suffocating, mass-marketed corporations that now dominate what we used to call the press.
But there is little doubt that as new and old media really get to know one another, as they started to on Friday, neither one will be left unchanged.
For perhaps the first time, a major print news organization decided that electronic media was the best way to report breaking news. Newspapers have clung beyond all reason to a pretense that they are still in the breaking news business they dominated for so long, even though most breaking stories are seen live on TV or mentioned online hours, sometimes days, before they appear on newspaper front pages. Most newspapers would have held on to this story for dear life until the presses rolled.
In this case, the Morning News showed that papers can use their Web sites to present new, rather than just old, information.
Like TV or radio, the Web is a powerful vehicle for transmitting a news story to a wide audience - within hours this one was on almost every radio and TV station in the country.
Finally, a respected news organization has grasped that, for the information culture, the real significance of the Web has little to do with pornography or the so-called dumbing down of the young. It's potentially a powerful middle ground between old and new media, a vehicle for a paper to introduce a story quickly and discuss its ramifications. The paper remains a necessary adjunct the next day for analysis, follow-up and contextual detail and reaction.
It should now become clearer even to the reactionary dons running journalism that the Web isn't a threat to the coherent flow of information, but potentially its greatest champion. The Web continues to reinforce and make possible a powerful new information reality: censorship is dead.
By breaking this story on its Web site, the paper forestalled the kind of protracted and censorious legal struggle The New York Times and The Washington Post went through trying to publish the Pentagon Papers. It also made sure no other news organization scooped it on its own story, no small matter in the digital age, when information leeches all over the place.
The paper's decision may also quiet some of the clucking by journalism's entrenched traditionalists and media icons like Walter Cronkite about the Net transmitting so much dangerous and unfiltered information.
Here is a well-known, award-winning, serious metropolitan daily with high standards, reporting and standing behind a controversial but important story. Although it first appeared on the Web, it had to meet the News' journalism requirements, including rigorous sourcing.
Thus, we know exactly who's telling us this story and how much attention we do or don't want to pay. Thanks to the paper's Web site, we also have the means of letting them know what we think about it.
Perhaps the historic decision will help to cool the irrational, sometimes bizarre mainstream media portrayal of the digital culture as de-civilizing, sexually degenerate, chaotic, and irresponsible.
There's no reason why we need only an old or new media. There are critical points when both work naturally together. Here's a story first reported online, then followed up in the existing and very text-driven form of the daily paper, where it can be read, digested, toted around the house and office, and passed on easily to friends, colleagues, and family members.
The Morning News wasn't scooping itself by putting this story on the Web. It was performing in the time-honored traditions of the press - breaking the news first. The paper wasn't undermining its value as a coherent portable print medium, but enhancing it. The paper itself seemed to sense this, not only reporting the McVeigh story on its Web site, but also reporting on the phenomenon of the Web story.
This was a landmark move in journalism history, especially in light of the sad and costly reluctance of the newspaper industry to get off its collective and stuffy bottom and figure out how to use new media in creative ways.
More than 700 newspapers have dumped their static, stale content online, to little effect. With a handful of exceptions - the San Jose Mercury News, The Wall Street Journal - papers' use of the Web as a news medium has been dull, expensive, and counterproductive. The Dallas Morning News has sent an important signal to the newspaper industry that perhaps newspapers don't have to wane or die, after all. They can choose to change instead.
Perhaps the most dramatic significance of the Morning News decision is that it addresses the most vexing difficulty new media has presented to the press - how to be first with important news in the digital age. The News' decision returns journalism to the breaking-news business, giving reporters the opportunity to carry out journalism's most elemental purpose - telling us what they know when they know it, rather than when the paper comes out or when the evening news comes on.
