Different Cultures, Different Missions

One of the strengths of the daily newspaper is to provide, at a quick glance--a full page of headlines, stories and pictures at a time--a sense of context and proportion, of judgment and priorities. That impact is missing for readers looking at a newspaper online, in short, computer-screen-size bursts.

“I read the Washington Post online every day,” says Michael Kinsley, who now lives in Kirkland, Wash., as editor of Microsoft’s Slate. But Kinsley, who was long based in Washington as editor of the New Republic and co-host of the CNN program “Crossfire,” says “it’s not the same as riffling through the pages and letting it wash over you while you sink into it.”

That is why Jon Katz, former media critic for the “CBS Morning News” and New York magazine and now one of the leading media commentators in cyberspace, believes newspapers are making a big mistake by investing in online publication. The daily newspaper and the Internet are different cultures with different missions, and “each does what it does well,” he says: Newspapers that go online are in danger of simultaneously surrendering what they do best and failing to take advantage of what the Internet does best.

“The rush online is a monumental tragedy for journalism,” says Katz, who writes the “Media Rants” column for hotwired.com. Instead of “taking what little money they have and dumping it” into cyberspace, he says newspapers should invest in improving their basic print product--hiring more reporters, editors and graphic designers, making their papers more attractive, more relevant and more responsive to their readers, finding ways to interest young readers, “covering stories more intelligently,” providing better cultural coverage and more investigative journalism.

But newspapers have been historically resistant to change, largely because of what Katz calls “their ingrained belief that they are the superior, serious, worthwhile medium, while things electronic are trivial or faddish.” Thus, most online newspapers are the equivalent of “Lawrence Welk trying to dance at a rap concert.”

Even newspapers that do provide Web-worthy features often do so in a way that makes them difficult to use--or even to find--and the updating that most newspaper Web sites offer several times a day isn’t original material created by their own paper; most online newspaper staffs are composed primarily of editors, producers, technicians and designers, with few, if any reporters, and most of the updated material comes from Associated Press and Reuters news services.

With some notable exceptions, online newspapers tend to use “shovelware”: They essentially shovel the content of their printed papers onto the Internet, without either providing much new or original material, making it truly interactive, displaying it in a significantly more compelling fashion or doing anything else that sites created specifically for the Net routinely do.

“The notion that you can just re-purpose the [newspaper’s] content is a silly notion,” says Peter Neupert, vice president for news and commentary at MSNBC. “This is not a winning strategy. You don’t learn. You don’t help the brand. You don’t exploit the medium.”

But new media have historically started out by emulating their predecessors. Early radio news consisted simply of reading a story into a microphone--a newspaper with sound. Early television was shot with one camera in a studio--radio with pictures.

It is possible, of course, that the Internet will be a short-lived fad, much like eight-track tapes or CB radios. After the novelty of interactivity wears off, people may decide that they don’t really want to “talk back” to their news and information providers; after all, Time Warner announced in April that it was shutting down its much-ballyhooed interactive television network.

Or maybe the Internet will wind up as just a sophisticated alternative to the telephone--”a communications technology that never became a news and content medium,” in the words of Michael Wolff, who was president of Wolff New Media in New York before he left and the firm subsequently closed in April.

Ultimately, however, none of these scenarios seems likely. People who underestimate the potential of the Internet may find themselves in a decade or two feeling like the Western Union executive who said, in 1876: “This ‘telephone’ has too many shortcomings to be seriously considered as a means of communication.”

But right now, no one really knows for sure just when, how or in what form the Internet will finally evolve. As Andrew Barnes, president and chief executive officer of the St. Petersburg, Fla., Times, puts it:

“I’m sure that this [Internet] is important. I’m sure that something is happening. But I’ll be goddamned if I know what it is.”