News Wars

Who says the rough-and-tumble days of reporters slitting each other’s throats for a scoop have passed?

Late last year, the online news service CNet posted a scoop for its Internet-savvy audience: a merger between Netscape and its networking competitor Novell.

One problem: It wasn’t true.

“If they had called,” says Roseanne Siino, Netscape’s vice president of corporate communications, “I could have told them off the record, ‘You’re way off, kids.’ ”

But they never did call, and as many in the technology industry complain, they rarely do. The rise of online news services devoted to technology fields has been so sudden, and their competition so ferocious, that they have become fixated more on scooping one another, even if by nanoseconds, than on getting the story right.

It’s not surprising that so much of this is reminiscent of the days of no-holds-barred competition in Chicago and New York, chronicled in plays and movies such as “The Front Page.” For though the medium is different--the cybernetic ether rather than paper and ink--thestakes are the same: readers and advertisers.

“Like anything in publishing, if the readers come then the advertisers will follow,” says John Dodge, who oversees ZDNet.

In fact, much of the competition has its origins in a rivalry among print publications. ZDNet is an offspring of Ziff-Davis Publications, owned by the Japanese company Softbank, which publishes a raft of successful personal computing magazines. TechWeb belongs to CMP and InfoWorld Electric to International Data Group, two other major tech magazine and newsletter publishers. Meanwhile, the independent Wired magazine has spawned the online service HotWired.

Joining the fray but standing somewhat outside this circle are CNet, which offers syndicated radio and technology programs but has no print analogue, and MSNBC, the online stepchild of a Microsoft-NBC joint venture.

Initially, the computer trade magazine publishers treated the online side of the business gingerly, worrying that they might cannibalize their still-lucrative print franchises by inviting readers to get their news from the Web.

Consequently, most began with Internet sites that were little more than electronic copies of their magazines. But competition from HotWired and CNet’s aggressive news operations forced them to establish separate Internet news services--the fear being that the Web would become an important source of revenue that might eventually overshadow print.

Some organizations try hard to focus their print and online services on different goals.

Mitchell York, editorial director of CMP, says his company’s print publications--most of which are weeklies--are supposed to hew to the analytical high road. That leaves the gathering of transitory scoops, once the bread and butter of the trade magazines, to their online counterparts. The change, York admits, has been difficult for the print journalists, who have been loath to hand over exclusive stories to Internet news operations. that still have only a fraction of the readership of the magazines.

Some worry that in the zeal for scoring scoops, journalistic ethics are falling by the wayside.

“It seems to me that in the emphasis in getting news, accuracy or completeness is getting sacrificed,” says Siino of Netscape, which has been the subject of numerous damaging--and inaccurate--online scoops. “There have been rumors about Netscape reported without the reporter having ever checked it with the company, and I think that’s plain irresponsible.”

Of course, such glorification of speed over accuracy is nothing new in American journalism. Back in the days when wire service reporters slugged it out to be first in line for the telegraph key, United Press International correspondent Roy Howard reported the end of World War I on Nov. 7, 1918--four days before the real armistice. Far from being fired, Howard ended up as UPI’s chairman.

Nowadays the online services trip over one another trying to get the earliest time stamp on their electronic scoops. ZDNet even keeps a “scoop scoreboard.” When the service is first with an important story, ZDNet’s public relations arm quickly cranks out a news release trumpeting its latest win over its half a dozen competitors, a victory that sometimes can be measured in minutes and sometimes in seconds.

But a genuine scoop in the highly competitive world of Internet news is hard to come by and even harder to prove.

It’s really hard to claim an exclusive,” complains Evan Schuman, editor of TechWeb, CMP’s online news service and one of ZDNet’s archrivals. “You’ll post something on your site with an ‘exclusive’ banner, and before long you get an e-mail from someone saying, ‘Weren’t you aware the Ukrainian Tribune had that item hours ago?’ ”

For all that, the services’ editors claim that accuracy and impact, not just speed, are among their priorities.

“We want readers to consistently look at our site and say, ‘Wow, I didn’t know that,’ ” Schuman says. “That will keep them coming back to us.”

Such eclat is crucial because of the sheer number of competing services, which rival the old days in which New York City once boasted as many as 12 daily newspapers.

“We’re all being buried in an avalanche,” says Orville Schell, dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at UC Berkeley.

“It’s overwhelming, all the information that’s out there on the Internet.”

Others complain that as news nuggets become more numerous, their individual heft diminishes.

“A lead [sentence] in a Los Angeles Times article is [enough for] an Internet news story,” acknowledges Merrill Brown, editor of the online news portion of MSNBC. “If we find out that President Clinton is having a press conference tomorrow at 10 a.m., we’ll put it up. We might not know the subject of the press conference, but the fact that it’s happening is enough to make it a story for us.”

The jobs of online reporters differ from those of their counterparts in more than intensity. In the online world, programming skills are at least as important as information-gathering talent. The ability to embed appropriate World Wide Web links in one’s story, is often what distinguishes Web news from more traditional varieties.

But that raises numerous ethical concerns. The common practice of including hypertext links within a story to other Internet sites sometimes leads viewers to promotional sites for businesses that happen to have been mentioned in a news item.

For example, a story on Microsoft, even if negative, is likely to have a link to the software giant’s Web page, where it touts its latest products. Online editors say such links are a reader service, but critics say they further blur the already fuzzy line between editorial matter and advertising on Internet news services.

CNet and MSNBC, which pride themselves on aggressive coverage of the computer industry, have among their owners companies with huge commercial interests in that business. Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen and Intel both own stakes in CNet (which the service discloses in any story about the billionaire entrepreneur or the chip giant). Both MSNBC and CNet say they have received no pressure from their corporate parents to soften stories.

UC Berkeley’s Schell has other concerns.

“Even though I am by and large a pluralist and believe in a diversity of voices, I do think we are losing the central consensus-building media that have been important to our society,” he says. “The days when a group of people got together for dinner and everyone had read this story or that one in the New York Times and could discuss it over the meal are vanishing.

“Things are so fractured now that I worry we’re all speaking a different language.”