The Netly News, Time Warner's daily take on the Web that backs up its Net-insider's sarcasm with groundbreaking reporting on First Amendment showdowns, encryption, censorware, the history of online culture - and titillating doses of Valley-to-Alley gossip - will not perish with the departure of founding editor Noah Robischon.
Despite reports of its imminent demise, Netly will continue in its present form for another two or three weeks, and reappear in streamlined form as a publication more tightly focused on the economics of the Net, and more closely branded with its parent site, Time.com.
Two more full-time staffers will come onboard, including Nathaniel Wice, co-author of the pop compendium alt.culture, who has signed on for three months.
Time Daily editor Josh Quittner, who launched Netly with Robischon in November of 1995 as the first all-original content site on Time Warner's Pathfinder network, says he considered sending Netly to the bitbucket when he learned that Robischon was leaving to become a new-media reporter for Steven Brill's Content, a magazine that Brill touts as "the consumer guide to the information age." Content is slated to hit the newsstands this June.
Quittner acknowledges that he had a hard time imagining what Netly would be without the input of Robischon, who has been the editor of the site's daily content for more than a year.
"When Noah told me he was leaving, I was profoundly sad," Quittner says. Part of that sadness, he reflects, is an acknowledgment that some of the original excitement about the medium that fired up projects like Netly has worn off.
"Three years ago, when we first started to hatch Netly, there was so much promise," Quittner says. "Everybody thought they might become the next New York Times, the next Wall Street Journal." Quittner and Robischon set out to create a daily forum that would emphasize canny, Net-native original reportage, and avoid the recycling of factoids and attitudes that dominated other sites.
With Declan McCullagh's reports from Washington, the site became a must-read for those tracking free speech issues and censorship online.
Though Quittner maintains that the Web is "still a great medium," he believes Netly's original format of running one in-depth feature a day is outdated. "That only appeals to hardcore digital-culture types," Quittner observes. (While Time Daily has zoomed in six months from 65,000 page views a week to 115,000 page views a day under Quittner's stewardship, Netly stalled at 100,000 page views a week.)
The new Netly will run a greater number of leaner stories per day, more in keeping with Jonathan Gregg's tightly written, breaking news-driven Afternoon Line, which debuted on the site after a redesign in 1997. Netly coverage will be "short and punchy," Quittner says, joking that he likes to "be a whale and get my information krill online - taking little bits and shoving them in my eyes."
Part of why the one-shot approach no longer works, says Robischon, is that as the Net has grown and diversified, there are more breaking developments every day than can fit in a single sassy think-piece.
"We started out by saying, 'This is the most important story in cyberspace today,'" Robischon recalls. "It's not that simple anymore."
Now that the Web is becoming integrated into the daily lives of more and more people, sites have to decide if they're going to pitch their content to a narrowly targeted niche, or to a mainstream audience, Robischon contends.
As the medium changed around it, Netly matured in its tone and approach, says Robischon. "We were much more juvenile when we started. We had to grow into smarter, and less smart-ass, reporting."
Though Robischon admits that "the editorial mission was not as tightly focused as it could have been," he believes that the broad purview the writers were allowed accounted for some of Netly's most playful and successful pieces, such as a Q&A with the man who hurled a pie in Bill Gates' face earlier this month, and a special edition of Netly created with the guidelines of the Bandwidth Conservation Society in mind, featuring tiny print and reduced GIFs - which triggered kvetching from a handful of readers about Netly's "new look."
While the revamped Netly will attempt to boost its own profitability by attracting more mainstream readers, its reportage will focus on the tech companies that are driving changes in the evolving economy. "We're going to put our dollars on the reporting side, and focus on the money, the bottom line," Quittner explains.
Both Quittner and Robischon credit Time's managing editor Walter Isaacson, and other senior staffers in the company, with supporting Netly's freewheeling, muckraking approach, even as the site lost money.
"A lot of online publishers would have killed Netly a long time ago for the kind of rabble-rousing we were doing," Robischon says. "Isaacson believed in us all along."
