NEW YORK -- At the Newsweek headquarters on 57th Street in Manhattan, there's a three-story wall of magazine covers that provides a dizzying capsule history of the 20th century, from Mussolini and Mae West to Jerry Garcia and lesbian chic, in one long glance.
Now a computer monitor may have to be mounted on that enormous wall.
Newsweek.com, the long-awaited Web incarnation of the weekly newsmagazine, will launch 4 October with a site emphasizing breaking news, chatty infobites, image galleries, and international coverage from Newsweek's Asian and European print editions.
Content on the site will benefit from alliances with The Washington Post, which is owned by the same parent corporation (The Washington Post Company) as the magazine, and Encyclopedia Britannica, which has signed on to annotate features with historical information and provide guides to other Web sites in areas such as health and technology.
Newsweek.com will mirror the contents of all editions of the print magazine -- including the Asian and European editions -- supplementing cover stories with Britannica-researched sidebars.
Headline news, furnished by the Post team, will be updated every 20 minutes.
There will be no bulletin-board areas on the site at first, but eventually Newsweek.com plans to host auditorium-style chats with celebrity guests.
The "other" newsweekly's site, Time-Warner's Pathfinder, has been on the Web since 1994. Though Newsweek has hosted an area on AOL since June 1996, only a bare placeholder page has resided at Newsweek.com. Even with basically no content, the Newsweek name still draws 50,000 page views a week.
Editor and general manager Michael Rogers, who has been involved with Newsweek new media since a Laserdisc Hypercard project in 1989, downplays the magazine's delay in embracing the new medium.
"It's a long game," he says. "We've never understood the rush. We plan to be in this business 10 years from now."
He acknowledges, however, that the upsurge of interest in the Internet as a source of breaking news during the current presidential crisis -- and in Web-native publications like Salon -- "accelerated" the process of launching Newsweek.com.
"We were well underway," he says, "but the print side [of Newsweek] became much more interested in what we were doing."
The site will allow Newsweek to break hot stories sooner -- a capability made more attractive when a leak on the Drudge Report last winter forced the magazine to publish the story breaking the news of President Clinton's affair with Monica Lewinsky on its AOL site.
Lisa Allen, senior media analyst for Forrester Research, says that a just-released study indicates that 29 percent of users of online services log on to read newspapers and magazines.
"By offering breaking news and international coverage, clearly [Newsweek.com] is in the right ballpark," she says.
Allen wonders, however, if non-interactive content repurposed from print will be engaging enough.
For the launch on 4 October, the first visual feature will be an exhibit of Van Gogh paintings scheduled to open at the National Gallery on the same day. Newsweek art critic Peter Plagens will supply spoken commentary. Audio-annotated still photographs will be a mainstay of the site, with Newsweek photographers such as David Hume Kennerly and Peter Turnley recounting stories from the field.
Newsweek.com has locked down Compaq as an advertiser, along with the stable of advertisers from the magazine and the Post site. It is also courting others who are especially interested in targeting high-end, English-speaking readers in countries outside the United States who will be drawn to the international coverage.
Newsweek.com is not planning on going head-to-head with Pathfinder. "Our competition is not Time.com," Rogers says. "Our competition is other news sites."
Joshua Quittner, editor of Time Daily, says that his site has become "fabulously successful" after a sluggish start. Since Quittner took over, Time Daily's readership has soared from 50,000 page views a week to over a million. He declined to comment on Newsweek.com.
To his post as editor of Newsweek.com, Rogers brings both a solid track record in print and geek smarts. In the early '70s, he studied semiconductor design at Stanford University, and considered a career in Silicon Valley. A fiction-writing prodigy, he had a short story published in Esquire when he was 18, and went on to do 11 years of feature writing at Rolling Stone while writing novels.
Rogers' passionate interest in storytelling -- and his high regard for the written word -- will influence the direction of Newsweek.com as the Net evolves into a fat-pipe delivery system for video, audio, and text.
"We're going to look back at 50 years of TV," he observes, "and realize that TV was broken. For 50 years, we couldn't say, 'Slow down,' or 'Show me that again.'"
The great journalists now coming of age are "the ones who can see in all media to get the story across," he says.
