The Truth about Cyberhype

...admission to the site requires information about drinking habits as well as a home address...

...The BS detector that Hemingway said every journalist should have, ought to be spiking right now-yet plenty of American journalists are swallowing (and spreading) the hype...

...As Mitchell Stephens points out in A History of News, print journalism was like turning on a light...

...dragon sightings got farther from London as the light grew...

...Proclaiming their freedom from hierarchies, editors, controls, the onliners have brought back the dragon-sightings...

...Fun and games, no doubt, but will players then go out and buy a Big Mac or a Zima, let alone a new Corolla sedan...

...Quinn, Medicine Woman...

...Online media will be additive rather than dominant...

...Among the results of these three revolutions were, respectively, the Gulag, Howard Stern, and the Home Shopping Network...

...That's no misprint-1,200 customers...

...Eighty years ago, Soviet rhetoric promised the rise of a New Man after the "reengineering" of the means of production...

...Arthur O. Sulzberger, Jr., the Times's 42-year-old, computer-literate publisher, brashly declared that he was prepared to put the paper on the Internet, CD-ROM, whatever...

...Wasow, 24, is co-founder of New York Online, a "neighborhood" bulletin board with all of 600 customers in the city, and another 600 mostly in the tristate area...

...Beneath all the hype about Third Wave communications, the true business of cyberspace has been, and is likely to remain, e-mail and electronic information exchange (e.g., chatlines, bulletin boards, home pages...

...Print, it's said, will go the way of the Soviet Union...

...When some services began to run these logos along the bottom of the screen, users responded by blocking them out-literally, fastening black electrical tape on the screen...

...sponsors the Tribe Z (for Zima beer) chat room...

...We wrestled the power of LSD away from the CIA, and now the power of computers away from IBM...

...The model is the telephone company, old Ma Bell and her brood, who daily make possible hundreds of millions of private conversations-that is, people creating their own content...

...Brewer Adolph Coors Co...

...Leading media companies are racing to secure a place in cyberspace...

...Since then, logorrhea has grown more sophisticated...

...We suspect that the present print- and broadcast-based media system will prevail far into the future...

...This uncertainty didn't slow the usually cautious New York Times...

...But it's the media owners who need reassuring...

...Visitors to the home page on the Web run by Netscape, the hottest company in the Internet world, can get a free information search with a marketing hook: The results come back together with an ad for one of the search "sponsors" (Sun Microsystems Inc...

...Mainstream journalists may debate the ethics of outing closeted homosexuals...

...Actually, the Pathfinder images of Kathy Ireland, et al., were grainy compared to the swimsuit photos in the newsstand SI, but that hardly slowed the Web's testosterone-heavy audience...

...Sex and sexuality, in fact, account for a good deal of online journalism...

...Quinn list is accurate...

...One recent footnote dispatches Post readers to Digital Ink "for a list of Emmy nominations won by Dr...

...At least at this early stage, users are more interested in gaining a personal conduit than in buying someone else's content...

...News outlets normally wouldn't publish the 800 number for Posse Comitatus (free of charge, anyway...

...Now the new century approaches, and we're told that global computer networks will bring us another revolution, this one literally at our fingertips...

...Internet hyperlinks-which allow users to jump from one site to another automatically-accomplish the same thing...

...A promotional mailing boasts that the service lets you "search for a new restaurant by type of cuisine and location-or ask restaurant reviewer Phyllis Richman herself...

...At the commercial online services, companies pay to have their logos displayed on computer screens along with program menus...

...The visionaries talk up the glories of providing links to an endless supply of electronic information, but the journalists' old gatekeeper role is quickly missed...

...People will post messages to each other, use shareware, run up phone bills (their own or their universities' or their employers'), but they won't necessarily purchase information services...

...At most, such messages exert only a marginal influence-and sometimes represent a major annoyance...

...Hopeful, we tell journalism students that they will still be able to earn a living doing news work, if they master the traditional basic writing and reporting skills (they should be computer-literate, too...

...Journalism," New York Sun editor Charles A. Dana once said, "consists in buying white paper at two cents a pound and selling it at ten cents a pound...

...In the United States in the 1920s, the NBC network heralded the Age of Radio by dressing musicians in evening clothes and presenting the NBC Symphony of the Air...

...Then the "interactivity" kicks in: Coors mails out coupons and other promotional materials...

...Right behind sex is violence (as American as Apple Computers...

...At the opposite end of the spectrum, Dr...

...Despite the gold-rush fever, it's hardly clear whether media companies will profit in cyberspace...

...Promoting its online service, Digital Ink, the Post now appends a kind of footnote to some news articles urging readers to log in for related information...

...Yet after Wasow spoke to the print pooh-bahs, he told a reporter: "I was surprised how scared they all were...

...Not Net users...

...Their stop-press news was as old as the Internet itself...

...If someone would be kind enough to invent the technology, I'll be pleased to beam it directly into your cortex...

...Toyota's ad agency also tries an interactive come-on, letting users pick from various colors to give a "paint job" to the graphic of a showroom Toyota...

...A few weeks ago, one online magazine ran an article about the militia movement, in the process offering readers instant links to megabytes of militia propaganda...

...Hold on a nanosecond...

...In July, right after the papers carried news of Wolfman Jack's death following a heart attack, one user posted the "real" story: The deejay was killed by the same nitrate sodium poison pill that the CIA used to terminate LBJ...

...In the last two months, the New York Times, USA Today, Time, and Newsweek all reported in page-one stories and cover articles how shocked, shocked they were to find sex of every shape, kind, and permutation on the Net...

...the daily paper will be an artifact of a quaint past, like NBC's tuxedoed symphony...

...In 1952, an advertisement for the new medium of television forecast that "citizens will be better informed than they ever were before...

...The latest entrant is the Washington Post...

...For the online user, as for the TV sports viewer, the play's the thing...

...The written word evolved in part to stop rumor...

...Industry people recognize the apparent mismatch between their expertise and consumer desires...

...Net surfers can easily visit Holocaust-denial bulletin boards (active in the U.S...

...On America Online, McDonald's employs full-animation techniques to make a computer game of "driving through" a McDonald's roadside stop...

...It all has a familiar ring...

...15 years ago, the graduate students who hacked around ARPANET, the Pentagon's advanced research computer network that formed the basis for the Internet, exchanged boys' locker-room humor along with Defense Department data as soon as their professors left the lab...

...and in Germany...

...Stephen Bates, a senior fellow at the Annenberg Washington Program, is author of Battleground: One Mother's Crusade, the Religious Right, and the Struggle for Our Schools (Henry Holt, paper...

...This past May, the Nieman Foundation at Harvard University invited Omar Wasow to speak about the future of communications to a national conference of editors and publishers...

...Twentieth-century journalism has defined itself by applying the test of (approximate) truth before disseminating stories-always with the exception of such devolution-ary cousins as Bernarr MacFadden's notorious Daily Graphic of the 1920s and, more recently, supermarket checkout magazines and tabloid TV shows...

...Bulletin boards and chat groups churn out a huge stew of fact, error, myth, hoax, and fantasy...

...The quarter you pay for the paper entitles you to learn what the editors thought important in a Clinton speech...

...They're hastily putting the contents of their newspapers and magazines online, offering interactive services, opening home pages on the World Wide Web, forming alliances with telecommunications systems...

...Edwin Diamond teaches at NYU and is author, most recently, of Behind the Times: Inside the New York Times (University of Chicago Press, paper...

...electronic news and chat groups will find a modest niche among existing information systems...

...Radio didn't replace newspapers, and television didn't replace radio...

...Since the penny press of the 19th century, the general trend in the news business has been upward, toward credibility and (approximate) respectability...

...Posts to the Internet newsgroup alt.show-biz.gossip routinely natter on about which particular Hollywood actors are gay (and/or wear a toupee...

...In hopes of finding the holy grail of cyberprofit, media companies like the Times are trying to figure out a place for advertising on the desktop screen...

...Newt Gingrich boasts that THOMAS, the Library of Congress's online system, will shift political clout "toward the citizens and out of the Beltway" because, after all, "knowledge is power...

...Last year, the company sold off its women's magazine group and reacquired a substantial interest in the paper's news databases (from the Nexis and Lexis services...

...One can't say the same of a great deal of online info...

...pay a few bucks more and wade through the Big Muddy yourself...

...Modems make every man a cyberjournalist (the great majority of Net-ters are in fact guys...

...Consequently, the likely model for hypermedia is not a newspaper or magazine, even one created by cyber-sharpies working for Time Warner...

...At the conference on "Magazines & New Media," sponsored by the Magazine Publishers of America in New York in July, one of the symposia asked, somewhat plaintively, "The New Media Magazine: Has Anyone Found the Model...

...Not that the Post service is singlemindedly devoted to civic empowerment...

...Time Warner's Pathfinder home page on the Web offers access to selected contents of seven of its magazines, and was registering 100,000 visits a week to the site by Internet users until Sports Illustrated came out with its swimsuit issue, when the numbers rose to 100,000 an hour...

...The creators of this online content have effectively pushed news back down the evolutionary tree...

...Perhaps that's why Virtual Madison Avenue's latest approach is to go beyond brand awareness and make cyber ads that appeal to Netters' Nintendo sensibilities...

...Today, Penthouse magazine's home page is among the most visited sites on the World Wide Web-the service that makes your computer look like a magazine cover or a publicity press kit...

...Timothy Leary exults: "Never before has the individual been so empowered...

...For years, they've lived with their "garage nightmare"- that some school kid, working out of his (or her) parents' home, will invent the killer application rendering them obsolete: Digital David slays Print Goliath...

...Old gimmicks or new, the logos' promotional value is on a par with the signs promoting beer, banking services, and fast food plastered on National Hockey League rink boards or courtside at NBA games...

...and the Internet Shopping Network were among the first advertisers...

...At least the Dr...