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In terms of its use as a mass medium, this past week marked a historic point for the World Wide Web. Microsoft launched another of its Sidewalk sites, this time in New York City. That followed by just a few days Disney Corp.'s debut of ABCNews.com, a joint venture of ABC News and Starwave.
These projects represent a nascent category of media. They're part of the emerging middle media - between old and new media - that fuses traditional information with interactive journalism. Landmarks in several ways, the sites are most important because they dramatize both the mainstream media's new critical mass on the Web and the malignant corporatization of the digital culture by two of the world's most powerful, wealthiest, and least-scrutinized corporations.
These Web sites raise all kinds of questions for traditional media as well as for the Net. More and more, this period marks the end of the Internet and the Web as a wild and free information frontier inhabited by flamers, hackers, cybergurus, testosterone-driven adolescent males, and woolly-headed nerds.
This would be as good a time as any to throw up those black Web pages and go into mourning again. If you thought the CDA was a bleak proposition, mull this: We are now mainstream media.
The media giants (and those who wish to become media giants) are here. They are here in force. They have more money than anybody reading this is ever likely to have. They will draw even more money along with them; they make the prickly snoots at Slate look like Sucksters.
They embrace the pretense of interactivity, but don't buy any of the ideas behind it. They are safe for the middle class, and thus the advertisers that the middle class attracts. The mass marketers who dominate them will shun opinion and controversy. They will not transmit dirty words, strong points-of-view, idiosyncratic expressions. They are free of oddballs, flamers, hackers, and geeks who will, increasingly, recede to the far corners of their world.
They are, in other words, the essence of mainstream. And the above scenario, sadly, isn't fantasy, but history repeating itself.
Their arrival marks the boundary between one time and another, signifying a historic transformation.
The ABC News site matters because it involves not only TV's premier commercial news organization, but Disney Imagineers and the technologically innovative, Web-savvy Starwave, creators of ESPN Internet Ventures and its highly successful SportsZone.com site.
But Newyork.sidewalk is much more significant because it will appear in the heart of the world media headquarters and serve as - groan - yet another flagship opportunity for Microsoft's powerhouse hype machine.
Its location gives it considerable impact; it will be watched closely by the media, advertising, and publishing industries. If it works, it will send all sorts of shock waves all over the media world.
Because its producer, Eric Etheridge, is a friend and former editor of mine, and yet another talented defector to Microsoft, I can't write dispassionately about Newyork.sidewalk and shouldn't, other than to describe it as a site aimed directly at Manhattan's culture-crazed movie, restaurant, sports, arts, and music movers and patrons.
It runs restaurant and cultural reviews, and detailed advance listings of sporting and civic events.
Newyork.sidewalk is one of about 50 entertainment and culture sites Microsoft is launching worldwide. This collective effort, one of the costliest media ventures ever, seems an integral part of Bill Gates' efforts to transform Microsoft into the world's largest media company, a campaign launched last year by the startup of Michael Kinsley's insanely overhyped Slate, Microsoft's stunningly successful Blitzkrieg to legitimize itself as a media company. The Sidewalk sites have not yet received a fraction of the attention given Slate, but are vastly more important in terms of their implications for journalism.
Most newspapers and magazines have been so busy heralding Gates as the world's most important visionary that their publishers may not have noticed that he's launching the most threatening commercial assault on traditional journalism since television.
The Sidewalk sites are intended to pull in consumers interested in movies, restaurants, and almost every kind of cultural offering, along with the advertisers that follow them. This money and these customers will come right out of the already battered hides of local papers and magazines.
This assault hits journalism in one of its most vulnerable places. Coverage of popular culture in most papers is dreadful.
Journalism is an inherently stuffy and pompous institution. Most of the press considers coverage of popular culture on about the same par as the comics. Media have been suicidally busy for decades alienating the young with their blockheaded portrayals of popular culture, from rock and roll to the Internet, as evil and dangerous.
Microsoft seeks to capture a do-or-die demographic group for media, the very people that most newspapers, some magazines, and nearly all commercial broadcast-news organizations have been losing at an alarming rate for a generation. They are young, educated, have money to spend, and place movies, music, dining out, some TV, and sports at the center of their cultural and recreational lives.
The Sidewalk sites are intended to become a universal entertainment guide and information service. Wherever you are in America, and eventually in the world, all you'll have to do is click on Sidewalk, figure out which event you want to take in, make your reservations, and locate the movie theater.
If it works, it will alter the economics of mainstream journalism dramatically. You don't have to be a media mogul to imagine the opportunities for a restaurant owner or chain whose menu, location, and reservation status can be instantly and graphically located by the mobile and affluent citizens of the digital nation, a group with the most leisure time and disposable income on the planet.
The same possibility applies to movie theaters, TV producers, concert promoters, and sports teams.
Cultural and entertainment sections are among the most profitable sources of advertising revenue for newspapers and magazines that face dwindling and aging audiences and tough competition for advertising.
As for the Starwave-ABCNews site, it is at this point as journalistically unambitious as it is graphically appealing. The site is oddly cheerful and restless for a news site. Almost everything on it moves or blinks. It may be the most technologically adept mainstream journalistic offering on the Web, offering state-of-the-art graphics and onrushing headlines.
But like most mainstream journalism sites, it also offers only the illusion of interactivity. Sure, you can email Peter Jennings and say hi. But the sites reminds us how bitter a pill interactivity really is for traditional news organizations, and how little they understand that on the Web, it isn't a side show, but one of the main events.
ABCNews.com presents pointless surveys telling us things like 61 percent of Americans think other Americans are rude. But the editorial ethos is typically top-down and bland. Here's the news; you can take it or lump it, but you don't get to participate in the process. There isn't even an easy and visible place to speak up and kick issues around, surprising for the creators of such an intensely smart and interactive site as SportsZone. The deadening hand of traditional journalism may be a bit too visible here.
One of the most interesting things about news in the l990s is that there is far too much of it, especially online. Dozens of mainstream news organizations - from Pathfinder to American Online to CNN to ABCNews.com - are recycling their information from other media via their Web sites. This is so familiar a goof as to almost be disorienting. Losing ground offline, mainstream journalism is spending a fortune to go digital, only to shoot itself in the other foot with the same gun.
We drown in information we already know or don't need, and starve for information, vivid writing and opinion, smart cultural coverage, participation, and debate that we desperately want and can't find.
There is little about these sites to individualize them, apart from local news. The cost, repetition, and homogeneity is staggering. They are almost instantly dispensable.
The few news organizations making money online - such as SportsZone or The Wall Street Journal - offer specialized kinds of information to people who want, need, and depend on it - like sports junkies and businesspeople. Such consumers can't get enough news, and the online culture is tailor-made to present fresh statistics, discussion, hard information, and breaking stories all day and night.
The Sidewalk sites also specialize, taking aim at popular cultural events, perhaps younger Americans' most commonly shared experience. This is the media experiment to watch. If Microsoft can transcend its dull corporate ethos - so far, it never has - and bring attitude, interactivity, and utility to this subject the way SportsZone has brought sports to the Web, media will change.
For better or worse, the ferociously free, opinionated, and geeky Net and Web culture now coexist with this eerie middle media. It's a strange neighborhood. Neither side wants to live near the other, but both are stuck with one another.
Can we get along?
No.
The problem is the dreadful history of corporations and media. You can't bother them, but they can drive you crazy. Media corporations don't grow, they metastasize. Since they can't create anything interesting or creative on their own, they scarf up everything around them. They tend to suck up all the air in the atmosphere, as well as many of the politicians and regulatory agencies.
Media corporations have been a disaster for journalism as well as for the free and vigorous discussion of ideas. They are dull, timid, and obsessed only with mass marketing.
It's too much of a stretch to welcome Microsoft, Disney, and their ilk to the neighborhood. But almost everyone will have to deal with the consequences of their increasingly conspicuous presence.
