News About News

...Still in its infant stages, it was unaffected by the telecom debacle...

...That recent Online Publishers Association study estimates that 1,700 American sites (excluding gambling and pornography) now charge for content...

...Nielsen, in reporting the audience levels of news Web sites, keeps to the more traditional definition...

...He has also said, "Newspapers cannot be defined by the second word-paper...

...How to tell news from nonnews is a frighteningly larger problem in the case of the Internet than it is with television...

...Some claim to be profitable, others that profitability is in sight...

...The Times would give the news at 11 p.m...

...This takes on greater seriousness because certain dramatic offerings are being staged as newscasts, or the visual and verbal clichés of television news presentation are intentionally incorporated into cop shows and comedy sketches...

...Association with a newspaper helps, but that ignores valid independent news sources...

...This is a long way from those very early days of the World Wide Web when everything was presumed to be free, the days when an Internet missionary named Doc Searls proclaimed, "Nobody owns it...

...Nevertheless, it is inevitable that the Web will become a major news medium, probably even the pre-eminent one...

...So they will dominate the news however it is transmitted...

...Yahoo came in third, die New York Times fourth, followed by ABC News, the Gannett newspapers, and the Washington Post...

...So far nothing has happened...

...Although it will take time, trial and error, argument and denunciation, it is a development King Canute himself could not stop...

...Using a ribbon of text crawling along the bottom of the picture-still a device exclusive to news departments-or having the announcer deliver his sales pitch in a setting that in any way looked like a newscast-four clocks along the wall, and so forth-were enough to disqualify a commercial...

...The logic seems to have been that getting into cable television is a portal into the World Wide Web...

...Online newspapers and the sites of CNN, MSNBC, the BBC and other news outlets are part of the mainstream...

...World Wide Web insiders employ a special rhetoric about interactivity, participatory dialogue, pure democracy, and such...

...Station managers all over the country were asking: "Where will the silence originate...

...Phrases like "This Just In" or words like "Bulletin" were proscribed...

...The longest average duration of a visit among the top 20 went to the site operated by the ineffable Matt Drudge, ranked number 20, with 37 minutes...

...We who, from broadsheet to codex, are used to turning pages will give way in due course to those who have been conditioned to the paperless world of the Web and have no trouble finding everything there that interests them...

...A lot of the insiders' talk about the Web and the Net, trumpeting its universal availability and democratic perfection, implies that news is parthenogenetic...

...We will do it on the Web...

...But newspaper executives are convinced that the Web is, if not their future, a large part of it, and that subscription will be the principal revenue source...

...They all tend to have children in schools and mortgage payments to meet...

...The key, says Morton, is reporters...

...It was a period of great national nervousness and the planned gesture was greeted positively...

...Mark Deuze, an assistant professor at the University of Amsterdam, a center of communications theorists, identifies four types of online journalism...

...Newspaper owners argue among themselves about what are correct accounting methods when trying to establish that your online activity is profitable...

...He sees that as the breathing space they have to experiment with new technology, new markets, new business models, and new media...

...But here Deuze includes as well Weblogs, or blogs, personal Web sites where individuals-some of them journalists and some not-present diaries of their activities with comments about what they saw, heard, read, experienced, or thought...

...They've got to be defined by the first-news...

...CNN's general news Web site got almost 16 million visits during July, with an average duration of 26 minutes...

...Moreover, what is to stop an individual who has his own Web site from giving it the trappings of a newspaper...

...Morton notes that in 2001, perhaps the worst year for advertising since the Great Depression, newspapers owned by publicly traded companies managed an average profit margin of 18 per cent...

...Will the dominance of online news reduce the news audience further, or increase the number of people who are interested in news of only one field, like baseball, business, bridge, or stock car racing...

...Today the descendants and successors of the people who sent that teletyped question are pondering one that also appears innocent yet is technically complex: Where will news originate...

...This is a worldwide phenomenon...

...In a subsequent interview, Sulzberger elaborated: "I do not care when we print our last newsprint edition...

...The Seattle Post-Intelligencerreports that at least two Web sites are keeping track of the formerly free sites now charging fees for use (www.theendoffree.com and www.paidcontent.org...

...But how did it get there...

...Their classification of a news site is extremely elastic, though, even arbitrary...

...Meanwhile, more and more newspapers are going on line, and more and more are charging for what they put there...

...None of the Internet operations do it...

...We will do it in television...

...The rumors have died down...

...everyone can use it...

...What the Times was after was the stake in the New England Sports Network that came with the team...

...The third category is made up of news sites about news-media watchdogs and media discussion groups-maintained by the Poynter Institute, the Freedom Forum, Editor & Publisher weekly, and similar organizations...

...John Morton, one of the better-known consultants on the economics of news, thinks newspapers are uniquely equipped to move to the Web...

...They assume news is simply there, and the Web will move it everywhere, free, on demand...

...The chief of the newspaper's Washington bureau, Michael Oreskes, successor to such Times giants as Arthur Krock, James Reston and R. W. Apple Jr., was yanked out of that job to be the newspaper's televisioneer-inchief...

...At the same time the Web is providing the latest from the likes of the New York Times or the Washington Post, it can reward the avid searcher with hate messages, slanders or conspiracies...

...Online advertising is far less developed than subscription systems, and those who attempt advertising record at least as many failures as successes...

...Today that vaporous, visionary generation is giving way to the practical functionaries who must not only make it work but establish what it is best at, and how to make it pay...

...But wire services have staffs: reporters who observe events and record their occurrence, editors who shape reporters' accounts to fit the needs of newspapers and broadcasters, plus managers and salesmen...

...We will do it in print...

...There are many definitions of news, but few of them would embrace all of the professor's species...

...The Online Journalism Review, published-online, of course-by the Annenberg School of Journalism of the University of Southern California, tells the story of the Times participation in the syndicate that bought the Boston Red Sox baseball team last January...

...These provide place for exchanging ideas "often centered around a specific locality/community, or a particular theme such as worldwide antiglobalization activism or computer news...

...Looking for money, of course...

...Most American newspapers are finally following, moving from free access to a fee system, or requiring that users register, complete with password, preliminary to the day when they too will institute fees...

...For an indefinite time, it seems, we are going to be adrift in the current muddle...

...The graphics are ridiculously easy...

...Rumors were rampant in the rumor-besotted trade of talks with public television, and the search for corporate underwriters...

...The august New York Times is fully committed to publishing its news online, and reports what is still a small profit from gross annual income in the tens of millions, but a far cry from last year's deficit...

...Or, to put it less ominously, we are in a time of transition...

...The second category is maintained by search engines like Yahoo, which digest news from existing services for their subscribers and offer easy links to the various news sources in the first sector...

...In a speech at the observance of the newspaper's 150th anniversary, he said: "Implementing our long-range vision requires that we become more familiar with television...

...And if trust is eroded by exposure to false news outlets, it threatens to damage as well the reliable, responsible news presentations...

...He told the Online Journalism Review that his reading of all indicators points to the continuance of newspaper properties and their profitability, and that news will be delivered on paper for a very long time...

...Only newspapers," he says, "are economically organized to gather vast amounts of information...

...Newspapers have more of them...

...Each of these has many Web sites, and the searcher need not be burdened with the state of the world, or the country, or indeed his own town...

...The Online Publishers Association, an industry trade group, in examining the kind of content Americans are willing not only to summon up but to pay for, recently reported that during 2001 12.4millionAmericans paid something for some of what they wanted...

...Newspapers have an immense database and they are expert at manipulating it, massaging it and getting it distilled down to usable size...

...His first category is the mainstream news site, "offering a selection of editorial content and a minimal, generally filtered or moderated, form of participatory communication...

...The Internet could not do many of the things newly established companies assumed it could do, or users found the service wasn't worth the price...

...We will remain the major source of information in the country and perhaps the world...

...In the same light, one can understand the spurt in paid subscriptions to sports sites, which, besides scores and statistics, provide access to fantasy sports leagues, apparently a welcome respite for many from what was happening to their portfolios...

...APPARENTLY that includes the old, stolid 7ïme.s, the newspaper without which no news organization in any medium can exist, the newspaper of record, the ultimate source...

...Where does Web news go from here...

...According to Nielsen, about half of its top 20 such sites, in terms of audience, were operated by newspapers or newspaper organizations- 10 in June, nine in July...

...There are many who do not make the choice, and the evidence is that this applies especially to young people...

...anyone can improve it...

...An inherent weakness of television, I have always felt, is that news is being served up on the same glass surface as drama, comedy, sports, and the other various components of a mass entertainment medium...

...Or from creating a logo for herself that seems to denote a cable news operation...

...All it will finally require is for the generation to die off that is uncomfortable reading vertical scrolling...

...The San Diego Union say it is within a few thousand dollars of profitability...

...Deuze's fourth category consists of "share and discussion sites...

...Further, the Internet intensifies a danger that haunts television...

...MSNBC, the joint venture of Microsoft and NBC, ranked second with 15.5 million...

...the lowest to die Time magazine site, ranked number 10, with four minutes...

...They do not work pro bono...

...The Hearst Corporation, which is privately held and not obliged to report publicly, says its online operations are profitable and profits are growing 20 per cent a year...

...That Churchillian coda hearkens to when Sulzberger made brave to announce almost two years ago that the Times would go into full television news production, to replace the tawdry existing product...

...At some point in the not-too-distant future, achieving critical mass on the Internet will depend, to a large degree, on our ability to marry the printed word with the moving image...

...Says the Online Journalism Review: "The newspaper industry is preparing for change, and even if some of the rhetoric isn't entirely convincing, convergence with broadcast and online media is the shape of thing to come for newspapers...

...London's Financial Times reports that of its almost 3 million online users, 17,000 have so far agreed to pay subscription fees...

...The millions Nielsen reports as getting at least some of their news from Web sites did so after the boom in Internet and dot-com stocks ended in one of the greatest busts in the history of American business...

...Their expenditure on digital goods and services totaled $675 million, almost double the sum they spent in the year 2000...

...Professionals in the field have determined from this report that Internet users are finally learning they will have to pay for Web access, and that definitely includes news sites...

...For at least their first 40 years, each of the network news divisions had a senior executive whose duties included reviewing commercials to ensure that they did not give the impression of being news...

...Sales departments, whose members had sometimes labored mightily to sign up those advertisers, grumpily but conscientiously sent along all commercials that needed vetting, and perhaps with less than good grace accepted the news division's verdict...

...But none of that applies to Web news...

...It is both an efficient medium of information and an incubator for the unverified...

...A Web site costs a pittance...

...The Wall Street Journal has always charged its 640,000 online subscribers...

...Already, this is a lot of people and a lot of news...

...The mantle of journalism would seem to be wearing a little thin at this point...

...Criticizing what those millions got as inadequate, or untrustworthy, or confusing, or unedited, is a futile exercise...

...Maybe it is not as easy as it looks...

...Close to a third of that went to business and financial news sites...

...This is easily understandable in the light of what happened to the financial markets last year...

...Television doesn't do it...

...Included, too, are "alternative" news sites-the Guerrilla News Network, the Independent News Centers-which offer not only censorious views about the orthodox Fourth Estaters but access to additional sites that indulge comparable criticism...

...Everyone now accepts that the advent of the Internet has changed everything, but no one is quite sure how...

...Everything was proceeding as intended until about an hour before the projected silence, when NBC's teletypes, the principal channel of technical information and instructions between the network and its affiliates, began chattering wildly...

...The Belo, Gannett and McClatchy newspaper groups all claim that their online operations are in the black...

...To the unwary, and perhaps to the subconscious of the very wary, the distinction between the factual and the invented can thus be tenuous...

...the buzzword for the process is "convergence...

...But being interested in news, in what is going on, is a personal choice...

...On Television News About News By Reuven Frank An old-timer once told me how in the fall of either 1940 or '41, with World War II raging in Europe but the United States not yet a combatant, the powers at NBC (radio) decided it would be appropriate for the network to observe a minute of silence on November 11, the anniversary of the armistice that ended World War I. Notification went out to all the network's affiliated stations and a public announcement was distributed to the press...

...For example, is it proper to count in some of your take from classified ads, as some newspapers do, or from licensing activities involving archival materials, as others do...

...Out of the millions of Web sites, some provide news they have themselves derived, some transmit news from other sources, some stir up the electrons with their views, prejudices, fantasies, or scenarios and claim for them the rubric of news...

...One insider actually said, you can always take it from the wire services...

...Eastern five nights a week, and offer an alternative to the sordid crimes, car chases, and animal stories that infest America's local news broadcasts at that hour...

...Knight-Ridder claims to be getting there...

...All sites respond to the same keyboard, take equally long to summon up and are read on the same monitor...

...Whom can one believe or trust...

...Arthur Sulzberger Jr., the New York Times Company chairman and publisher of the newspaper, has declared, "If we're going to define ourselves by our history, then we deserve to go out of business...

...The purchase had little to do with baseball," according to the account...

...That still leaves the larger problem of informing the citizens of a free society so they can intelligently exercise their public duties...