Looks at the Promise and Failures of On-line Political Journals
Neff, Gina
FOUR YEARS AGO, when I began interviewing people who work in New York's Internet industry, I was struck by an irony: even though their employers and clients were some of the largest media...
...The network and the Web became new metaphors for social organization: we're nodes linked together by the choice and freedom to connect with likeminded others...
...clicking off what we don't—hides the fact that there are advertisers, editors, and demographers all counting those clicks, desperate to figure out some way to make money off of them...
...Just when the image of the Internet startup enterprise cowboy— ready to be his "own boss" (as an ad campaign's copy describes him), Palm Pilot and cell phone ready at the draw, firing flashing bits of code from java-fueled, late-night programming duels— became the image of the organization man, or rather, the anti-organization man, for a new economic revolution, we lost our claim on the Internet as a public space...
...Although communitarian dreams have had their moment in the new economy, the libertarian ones are more enduring...
...But, I don't know...
...Passively receiving information, well, that's just oh-so-television...
...Blacks can afford good stereos but not computers was one of his editorial asides on a report on the digital divide...
...Big money on the Internet may have hit the 9 6 n DISSENT / Winter 2001 MAGAZINES political idealists hard, but what has actually beaten them is how people now use the Internet...
...All three publish original articles and have some of the best writing on-line as well as links to related information both within and outside of their Web sites...
...Talbot described himself to the Los Angeles Times as "too much a '60s person" and as wanting his epitaph to read, " 'He made a cultural impact.' " Still, as editor of a publicly traded magazine, he has to answer to the same fickle cycles of the market, and when its stock value tumbled last spring, Salon was quick to ax 9 percent of its staff, including the founders of its "Mothers who Think" section, its media critic, and half of its full-time book review staff...
...Now that the Internet is so heavily capitalized with market thinking, all we have left to show for common space on-line is a handful of protest sites and the belief that somehow the medium is the message...
...and "FEELIN' SEXY...
...Still, this is the on-line home of Camille Paglia and David Horowitz, and Garrison Keillor's advice column, "Mr...
...But hey, if the information is free for the taking, how can we resist...
...If the price for ridding ourselves of the arrogant dogma of workasan-evil was losing, also, our political imagination, it was a high price indeed...
...In Still Life in Real Time, Richard Dienst compared the steam engine's aggregation and abstraction of labor in the industrial era to television's creation of value in viewers' leisure time in late capitalism: "We work at television, participating in the creation of value that appears to us in the form of images...
...And who, really, can blame us...
...Still, even in the early days of Internet publishing, the talk of worker-owned startups changing the rules of the economy and the promise of information setting us all free seemed charmingly quixotic...
...A profusion of new Web sites makes it harder to get people's attention, so that only the ones with the fat advertising budgets can afford to stand out...
...More people are participating online, but unfortunately, what digital divide activists have won access to is not the demos they were fighting for...
...As a tiny division of a big company, Slate doesn't release exact figures, so you can believe me or not as you choose...
...But before the first rumblings of the bulls and initial public offerings in Silicon Alley, New York's young and hip Internet pioneers were broke and idealistic...
...The recently expanded special issues—including a fabulous one on cities— and occasional longer essays and interviews give the magazine as a whole a little more substance...
...sALON, founded by David Talbot, along with other San Francisco Examiner veterans, at least has pretensions to progressive coverage of politics and culture...
...If we've helped to build community on-line, it's only so somebody else can cash in on it...
...And if that's not political enough, if you need statistics and categories, sorry, that's not what we're about here in the New Media...
...Although the structure of its dailies can feel a little like a seven-hundred-word rant, Feed has managed to create some smart pieces in a pared-down format and strike a fine balance between fresh commentary and thoughtful reflection...
...In keeping with its new media intelligentsia street credibility, the coverage in Feed tends to stay cultural and high tech, although politics slip in from time to time...
...Perhaps because nobody made much money back in those days, industry gatherings were more likely to end in conversations quoting Jean Baudrillard, Michel Foucault and Marshall McLuhan rather than stock prices...
...The articles seem more about creating buzz than culture...
...Two of the magazines discussed below are losing millions a year —Salon, for example, spent more than $21 million last year and lost more than $ I 3 million...
...News and analysis have lost out to headlines, business, sports, and the weather, not to mention the more dubious distractions such as "100,000% return on your investment...
...In such a context, the scraps of smart writing that make it on-line seem more like niche marketing to the intellectual set...
...on-line, it seems, we're all market-driven, click-happy Philistines with little time for thought or reflection...
...Is it any wonder that the most popular news, information, and entertainment sites (excluding AOL) are ZDnet.com and CNet.com...
...GINA NEFF is a student in the sociology program at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York...
...Hyperbole...
...The belief that the medium is so free that we are in control—clicking on what we want...
...Kinsley's lack of humor toward his magazine's being bankrolled by Microsoft certainly doesn't breach journalistic ethics, but it doesn't keep the rest of us from feeling giddy schadenfreude at turns of bad news for them, as when Slate abandoned both its print and on-line subscription efforts...
...Both sites cover business news about technology companies and reviews of high-tech gadgets...
...This is a contentious statement, given the euphoria over Internet-organized protests, progressive Web sites, and wonders of nonprofit uses of Internet publishing...
...Blue," comes off more moralistic than liberal...
...Old-media journalists have delighted in Salon's tit for tat with Slate, even though the rivalry has the vapid entertainment value of the bickering between a high school's yearbook and newspaper staffs...
...As for Salon's cultural impact with serious writing, one need look no further than its new design, which places its shopping section in one corner and headlines from a wire feed in another...
...Do the new media really differ...
...Internet users have become more diverse as the information superhighway has become little more than road signs and billboards...
...Excluding pornography, few sectors of Internet content turn a profit, and the only successful content subscription services to date have been business sites, with TheStreet.com and the Wall Street Journal Interactive among the most successful...
...Last summer, Feed announced its merger with Wired magazine's more-ironicthanthou on-line daily, Suck.com, ending its independence as the oldest on-line magazine...
...Users themselves— not professional media hacks—were to build the Internet and its communities with their own involvement, time, and passions...
...Maybe we had it coming...
...Microsoft has seamlessly integrated Slate into MSN.com with a strip of links along the top of Slate's pages to MSN's shopping, Email, and Web portal sites and links at the bottom to Microsoft's travel, auto shopping, chat sites, and such other MSN content as "When Cupid's Arrow Has Failed . . . ," "The Future of Office Romance: Should We Ban It or Let It Be...
...When forecasts become the most important message (today's high: 10,037 with partial clouds clearing in active trading), hopes for the Internet as a new democratic medium seem all wet...
...When Dan Savage, a syndicated sex columnist, covered the Gary Bauer campaign during the Iowa caucus, he wrote hilariously of his plot to give Bauer the flu as revenge for his attacks on homosexuals...
...As part of the Microsoft network of content sites, Slate is not required to publicly share its financial information, although editor Michael Kinsley assured his readers that Slate is losing money less quickly than Salon's $13 million-a-year burn rate...
...IN CONTRAST, Feed magazine is still a small "indy," complete with its own romantic Silicon Alley founders' story (New York apartment, money borrowed from family), barebones finances (claiming to have spent only $2 million in five years), and dreamy visionary (co-founder Steven Johnson was dubbed a "cultural critic with a poet's heart" in the Village Voice...
...Perhaps the decision to run such a piece was journalistically questionable, but Salon got wide, if critical, coverage in the print press for it, as it did for breaking the story of Henry Hyde's own affair as he was probing into Monicagate...
...Both are tiny compared to the sixteen million visitors a month to AOL's news site, the most popular news site on the Internet...
...Eric Alterman wrote in IntellectualCapital.com, a for-profit on-line bipartisan policy journal: "The great and painful irony of the explosion of new media during the past decade is that while it has falsely appeared to democratize media, it has actually cemented the power of the nine or so conglomerates that control most of the communications world...
...According to the Pew Research Center for the Press and the People, Americans now are more likely to own a computer than to report having watched the news or a news program in the last day, but those who get their news on-line every day are even less likely than nonInternet users to read newspapers or watch the news...
...You Can Have It All . . . FREE...
...Those early fantasies of communitarian utopia were based on the idea that mouse clicks differ somehow from those of a remote control...
...Maybe we did indeed...
...Interactivity these days is more likely to be checking stock prices or bidding on tchotchkes on eBay than debating policy or discussing community...
...Online magazines spend more than 50 percent of their budgets on marketing, and hourly rather than daily or weekly updates mean higher editorial costs...
...Slate is certainly the smuggest of the Web `zines—it's true that it has good writers and takes political coverage more seriously than either Salon or Feed but its smarmy, politically agnostic tone is at times unbearable...
...Given a new medium for communication, we all paid the price of our political imagination...
...Although not as tacky or ethically questionable q8 DISSENT / Winter 2001 MAGAZINES as the promotional advertorials Slate has run for the likes of Blue Nile diamonds—and the New Republic—taken as a whole, the magazine looks like a child lost in the middle of a shopping mall...
...When Slate announced a new piece of technology allowing readers to personalize the site, Kinsley wrote, "Now, if you'll excuse us, we'll go back to trying to produce a bit of journalism worthy of all this swell technology...
...FOUR YEARS AGO, when I began interviewing people who work in New York's Internet industry, I was struck by an irony: even though their employers and clients were some of the largest media and technology conglomerates in the world, workers I spoke to told me that they loved being in the freest medium around," in which the new technological revolution in "interactivity" would unleash a democratic spirit and crumble ignorance and tyranny...
...The merger of old and new media in the America Online (AOL) and Time Warner deal only amplified the dirge for Internet media independence begun by a chorus of commentators...
...The plugged in are tuning out other media...
...Perhaps it was true for a while that anybody could just "throw something up" on the Web and people would read it, but now the vehicle that seemed perfect for spreading democracy and do-it-yourself broadsiding is actually increasing the concentration of media...
...More telling of Salon's reportorial priorities is in what its Washington bureau chief David Weir said to the Boston Globe, "There's no bad buzz...
...When people do log on for "news," the most popular category is weather, and the Weather Channel's Web site alone gets more hits a month (more than 7.5 million) than any single on-line newspaper or magazine in the country...
...As twitchy and flashy as the Web has become, it's no wonder that the "stickiest" sites (a term used by the industry to indicate how long someone stays on a site) are those that emulate the eye-glazing effects of television...
...But between "repurposed" articles from print publications and loops of wire feeds, between the personal essays and PR-driven book and movie reviews, thoughtful analysis gets crowded out despite the best attempts of the some of the largest and oldest magazines online, such as Slate (www.slate.msn.com), Salon (www.salon.com) and Feed (www.feedmag.com ). In structure, Slate and Salon are more like traditional magazines, with features, columns, and short front-of-the-book snippets, whereas Feed is organized around one daily essay...
...Leaving aside the fact that there were (and still are) those who are left out, disconnected, and not plugged in, this comunitarian image of the Internet so prevailed that a venture capitalist like Esther Dyson could rave about the "powerful enabling technology fostering the development of communities...
...Fully one in four of those who get their news on-line daily admitted to making a stock trade in the last month...
...We're not the gatekeepers of what should be published...
...their merger was announced over the summer...
...In a recent review of Gig, a book by Word.com editors Marisa Bowe and Sabin Streeter, along with John Bowe, Keith Gessen suggested a different preface for this nineties take on Studs Terkel's Working: "The machine, it seems, will suggest its own form of resistance...
...In Feed's short, snappy essays on cultural and social life, writers will quote from Terry Eagleton, talk about the feminist implications of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, or debate biological determinism alongside musings on ad campaigns...
...THAT'S NOT to say there isn't some interesting political and cultural criticism on the Web...
...For all its technological bells and whistles Slate's site is heavy on commentary and summary but light on actual reporting...
...Still, Slate had almost two million "unique visitors" a month (the on-line metric for measuring "traffic" to Web sites), which is a million more viewers than Salon, its closest competitor...
...and "Find and Compare Homes On-line...
...Unfortunately, this free medium is quite expensive...
...Political coverage usually gets no further than Beltway antics, although the coverage from the Seattle protests last autumn was a notable exception...
...They're also younger, richer, better educated, and more likely to be male (Three-quarters are under fifty, and half have family incomes of $50,000 or more...
...Of course...
...Content competes in a sped-up online economy, though, and this kind of writing— especially reporting—is too slow, too general, and too expensive for the demands of freshness, customization, and profitability made by the medium...
...Just look at the haughtiness of Judith Shulevitz's "Culturebox" critiques and Scott Shuger's scandalously politically incorrect summaries of the "Daily Papers," the same kind of summary of the morning papers he wrote when he worked for Naval intelligence...
...DISSENT / Winter 2001 n 97 MAGAZINES tion gathered about users and what they do online makes some folks squirm (and rightly so...
...Content-heavy sites have yet to figure out what their "business model" is to be: fewer than .02 percent of viewers click through to advertisers' sites, most subscription efforts have flopped, and selling the informa*This excludes American Online's proprietary news and entertainment channels to which only AOL subscribers have access , which both get more viewers per month than CNet and ZDNet...
...Startup costs now for professional Web publications are higher than those for their print counterparts...
...or, judging from the guilty pleasures and procrastinations among my own Web site bookmarks, horoscopes, shopping, manners and advice columns, and other "women's" diversions...
...Given the price of both Internet technology and the `content,' these new technologies can be leveraged only through enormous economies of scale...
...To perform this job for capitalism, television does not need to offer meaning or pleasure, just a structure of time and a mechanism for profit...
Vol. 48 • January 2001 • No. 1
