On Television
FRANK, REUVEN
On Television Future Unclear By Reuven Frank A funny thing happened on the way to the future. It slowed down. Before last summer's national political conventions, newspapers were replete...
...The Republicans had promised "exclusive" online access to top party officials...
...What passes for news at present may not be insignificant, but it pales before what reporters were covering before the Berlin Wall came down...
...Sites with good reputations have gone under, having burned up millions in start-up capital once easily obtained through initial stock issues...
...And newspapers, they say, have many profitable years before them...
...Many of the others have tried, but gave it up when it didn't work...
...Old crocks in the news business grumbled about the pitfalls of unedited news, but they were laughed off as antediluvian...
...Online coverage of the national political conventions was a bust, both in terms of content and presentation...
...The piece talked about money, about the deterioration of TV news, and about major print opinion and public affairs magazines depending on a form of philanthropy to survive...
...The greatest, clearly, is financial...
...Now that the networks were scheduling as little on the events as they judged they could get away with, the Internet would pick up the slack...
...Members of what was being called the "dot.com press corps" operated out of a large area distinct from the curtained-off desks of the newspapers or the control rooms and trailer off ices of the networks and cable services...
...Among younger and better-educated people, the Internet is making even bigger inroads...
...Inter@ctive Week, an online trade magazine devoted to the ins and outs of the Web, early in the summer had detailed the plans for Web coverage of the political conventions with hardly suppressed enthusiasm...
...According to a study by the Los Angeles Times, the Journal's Internet site, with 461,000 paying subscribers, has lost money every month but one in its five years of existence...
...One online trade magazine enthused: "Most recognizable to conventioneers were roving reporters equipped with Xybernaut's Intel x86-powered Mobile Assistant IV (MA IV), a multifaceted portable computer, complete with an 8-gigabyte hard drive and Intel Pentium Processor attached to the hip, a keyboard worn on the wrist and a handheld pinpoint camera...
...Some are suing the wire services that spread the unedited and unverified news...
...Salon, one of the few Internet magazines to get itself well-known, fired 13 staffers last June, including the wife of the founder and editor...
...Publishers have to find alternative means other than subscriptions...
...A market researcher told the American Journalism Review, "People are used to getting what they want for nothing on the Internet...
...This may be inherent, or it may be merely generational, waiting for those of us who learned to read by codex, turning pages, to die off...
...In its study the L.A...
...They believed him...
...As Americans grow more reliant on the Internet for news, they also have come to find online news outlets more credible...
...Politicians had been impressed by how effectively some of the candidates in the primaries, particularly former Democratic Senator Bill Bradley and Republican Senator John McCain, used the Internet to raise money...
...A recent confabulation of venture capitalists and eager e-business types considered plans for a free online movie service— one that organizes and books rock bands, another that teaches how to build backyard nuclear reactors and sell their energy, and one to be called Creamsoda.com —which is exactly what it sounds like, a way to buy cream soda through the Internet...
...Established Web sites like MSNBC.com and CNN.com were shocked because audiences during the convention weeks actually were substantially smaller than they are during average days...
...history...
...As for the survey's report that interest in news has generally fallen, at least in part this might be a reflection of how little there is these days...
...Emulex stock fell 50 per cent in a few hours...
...Pictures from highly touted 360-degree cameras, when they registered at all, were fuzzy and blurred...
...True, managing editors find enough to fill newspaper news holes and TV executive producers are able to keep the commercials apart, but how they do it emphasizes the thinness of the journalist's gruel...
...Slate, the online magazine financed by Microsoft, is edited by Michael Kinsley, who boasted to the L.A...
...Among the lessons yet to be learned by the acolytes of the Internet is the one about silk purses and sows' ears...
...Just as comprehensive, responsible, interesting news will be gathered and presented over the Internet...
...Republicans referred to theirs as Internet Alley...
...Respectable business wires picked up the release...
...Fully one-in-three Americans now go online for news at least once a week, compared to 20 per cent in 1998...
...Others found the public response discouragingly small, so they reduced their activities drastically when they moved from the Republicans in Philadelphia to the Democrats in Los Angeles...
...Those sites are unattractive to advertisers because people who do visit them spend on average a half a minute a day at them, according to Nielsen Internet ratings...
...Times that it loses less than $10 million a year...
...The executive editor of Internet operations for the Republican National Convention said, "Just as in 1948—it was the beginning of the baton being passed from radio to television—I think this will be the beginning of the baton being passed from TV to the Web...
...The 2000 convention promises to be an e-convention...
...Editor & Publisher reports that 148 of the country's top 150 newspapers have online editions or operations...
...They were too busy...
...A New York merchant bank estimates total revenues at $24.4 billion a year by 2004, which would make the Web the leading money earner of all the media...
...Vertical scrolling makes the Web uncomfortable to read...
...The fraud was quickly discovered and the share price was back up by the day's close,but several investors sold in panic and lost a lot of money...
...It lost $4.6 million in the second quarter of this year...
...Not at all...
...All this flies in the face of the widely reported biennial survey of the national news audience by the respected Pew Research Center For The People&The Press, which in August proclaimed: "Internet news has not only arrived...
...The MA IV also features a sophisticated head-mounted display with a 1 - inch screen that gives a 'bright razorsharp image of a 15-17 [inch] screen,' says Frederick A. Peterson III, vice president for governmental affairs and security at Xybernaut...
...Although the Pew report does not put it quite this way, its figures and conclusions, so foreboding to journalists in the older media (like television...
...Barely two years ago it managed to raise more than $26 million in a stock sale...
...The Post featured a long article by a writer for Congressional Quarterly, an all but holy text inside the Beltway, that compared what convention coverage would be in the year 2000 with what it was in 1960, when Americans were glued to their TV sets...
...Webjournalism has other problems...
...Whatever advertising money goes to the Internet, less than a tenth is going to news sites...
...Times reports that, according to the accounting firm of PricewaterhouseCoopers, Web revenues from advertising went from virtually nothing in 1995 to $4.6 billion in 1999, and were up to $2 billion in the first three months of 2000...
...Simply put, it is the perfect delivery system for advertising...
...The Washington Post and the New York Times were out in front as usual...
...Meanwhile, people who buy and sell and analyze stock in media companies strongly believe that TV will be a better advertising medium than the Web "forever...
...Several of the richer Web news operations managed to rent sky boxes above the delegates and balloons, just like CBS' Dan Rather and NBC's Tom Brokaw The parties themselves made a tremendous effort to accommodate the new arrivals...
...The hoaxer profited by $250,000...
...It's up to the business people to figure out how to make a profit.'" Newspapers have flocked to the Internet because they are afraid of being left out of a future they don't understand, not because any of them has found a formula for making money...
...It never happened...
...News now comes in spurts: stretches of hyperventilation about minor medical miracles interspersed with African famines, Balkan dramas, heartstopping conflict on the brink of peace in Israel, the deadlocked Presidential election...
...Then last August 24 a man in California, distressed because a stock he had bet would go down was going up, put a false press release on the Internet...
...But before Labor Day, with the conventions over, it ran an article entitled: "Journalism On The Web Has No Future...
...54 per cent of those over age 50 agree...
...Inside the Internet business itself, as you might imagine, all this was hailed and relished as a sign of acceptance and maturity...
...Many sites crashed, it noted...
...As large numbers of younger Americans turn to the Internet for news, the audience for traditional media is aging...
...Then you can put on it whatever you want and call it news, if that pleases you...
...America is fat, rich and uninterested, making frivolous any judgment of one news medium's primacy...
...But there are already 1.4 million Web pages of all sorts...
...Whatever the medium, gathering news is expensive...
...Sites with deep-pocketed parent companies have found them unwilling to lose millions forever and laid off thousands of employees, mostly professional journalists who joined them during the euphoric early days...
...Strangely, considering its title, the magazine went on to say: "Interactive television is increasingly seen as the oxymoron it always was...
...NOT SO LONG AGO our nightly images were of the Cold War standoff, the Manichean world of good guys and bad guys, the imminence of nuclear destruction, the hijinks of rogue states, the Cuban missile crisis, war in Vietnam, a President resigning, the long struggle for civil rights...
...He told them there was an online explosion going on and that newspapers had three years before beginning an irreversible slide into irrelevance...
...Getting attention requires advertising and marketing, which means more spending...
...Who pays for it, and how...
...Online news has been bom into a journalism mired in stock market gyrations and the reunions of long-separated twins...
...The users' attitude] is, 'Everything is free...
...His Democratic counterpart said the party's convention Web site "is allowing the Democratic Convention to be the most open and participatory event in U.S...
...In time, it all may happen...
...The Democrats called their area—so large it had to be divided into East and West—the Internet Avenues...
...Some sites found expenses higher than they had budgeted and cut way back from the beginning...
...Major events indeed, but short in term alongside the long sweeps of what preoccupied the Fourth Estate from the beginnings of the Great Depression to the collapse of Communism...
...Many more college graduates under the age of 50 go on the Internet every day than regularly watch one of the network nightly news broadcasts...
...It is a murky area and no one's opinion is unchallengeable...
...Each party set up its own Web site—www.gopconvention .com and www.dems2000.com—with bulletins and chat rooms and "reporters" employed to "cover" each delegation, plus opportunities for every delegate to talk with the folks back home...
...Compared with other media, it takes little money and almost no effort to start a Web site...
...its kitty is down to $ 15 million, and its stock price, once above $15 a share, is now around $1.25...
...It is attracting key segments of the national audience...
...Before last summer's national political conventions, newspapers were replete with accounts of how the most extensive coverage would come from the dozens of Web sites lined up to take part for the first time...
...In due time...
...The millennial Democratic and Republican gatherings would initiate the long-awaited efflorescence of online journalism—or journalism going online, which is not quite the same thing...
...Of them, only the Wall Street Journal successfully charges for its service...
...An argument for online news is that anyone can join the game...
...become more comprehensible when closer examination reveals that looking for business news, financial news, stock quotes, and the rest have been included in "going online for news...
...Italics in original...
...There is advertising on the Internet, but not enough to save the jobs of 3,500 workers in May 2000 alone...
...And 15 per cent say they receive daily reports from the Internet, up from 6 per cent two years ago...
...With the literature and the general atmosphere so laden with negative prospects for the survival of online ventures, journalistic and otherwise, it might be expected that the number of young wouldbe entrepreneurs seeking fortunes in their garages would decline...
...Not a fewwriters have hailed this as the ultimate in democratic expression, harking back to Tom Paine and the pamphleteers when opinion and fact were indistinguishable, and if you don't like it, go elsewhere...
...This year, the new medium is providing more extensive and in-depth coverage than the networks and cable news channels combined...
...The Democrats had promised that after making their speeches, their party stars would rush from the podium to the Web site for interviews...
...The American Journalism Review found out that "creating content requires manpower, which means labor costs...
...Each party gave substantial space to the 150 or so journalists working for the several dozen independent news sites...
...It reported that the company, Emulex, was being investigated by the SEC and that its chief executive had quit...
...APBnews, a respected Web site specializing in crime and legal news that was much relied on by many reporters around the country, closed down entirely earlier this year...
...In 1996, the still-nascent Internet had only a minor presence at the conventions," the Post piece pointed out...
...The overwhelming power of television is precisely that it requires no action on the part of the viewer...
...In reporting this failure, the Times added that technical demands seemed to be beyond the people on the scene...
...But the Pew survey cited earlier says, "Three-quarters of [television viewers] under 30 say they watch the news with the remote in hand...
...To know more and understand better, they invited Andrew Grove, the chairman of Intel, to address the 1999 convention of the American Society of Newspaper Editors...
...The special hardware was disappointing as well...
...BUT THE FUTUWSTIC newsmen got all dressed up with nowhere to go...
...Most important, the conventions were no more interesting on the dotcoms—with or without their own sky boxes, chat rooms and 360-degree cameras—than on the networks...
...Getting the news up requires new technology, which means capital expenditures...
Vol. 83 • November 2000 • No. 5
