Newspapers Take Different Paths to Online Publishing

The Internet is the new frontier in American life, the electronic equivalent of the Wild West. In these early years of the World Wide Web, about the only point on which even the pioneers in this still primitive digital culture seem to agree is that virtually everything being done now is so derivative of existing media that in the long run it will either have to change radically or fail.

This is especially true for daily newspapers, most of which are rushing to create online editions, often without a clear vision of how best to use the new medium.

“Newspapers are essentially repackaging what they do in print, and that’s a waste of time,” says Brock Meeks, editor and publisher of Cyberwire Dispatch, an online news service, and chief Washington correspondent for MSNBC. “If a paper goes online, it should have a different product than its print product.”

But how different? If it’s too different, does it sacrifice the brand-name identity that it spent decades developing--and that could give it a competitive edge in the battle on the Web?

There is no clear agreement among editors on how best to capitalize on--but not be cannibalized by--this powerful new medium. This is a problem both on such legal and ethical issues as copyright and plagiarism, and on the even larger question of how to maintain the core function, values and identity of a newspaper while taking advantage of the interactivity, synergy, graphic display and unlimited space the Internet offers.

Big-name newspapers are taking widely varying approaches to online publication. Even common ownership doesn’t ensure a common approach; the New York Times and the Boston Globe are owned by the New York Times Co., but they have strikingly different Web sites.

“Our site is very much the New York Times,” says Kevin McKenna, editorial director of the New York Times Electronic Media Co. “Theirs is very much Boston”--not the Boston Globe newspaper, but Boston, the city.

The Globe’s Web site, unlike the New York Times and the vast majority of other online newspapers, doesn’t look like its parent paper and is not named after it. It is called boston.com, and it includes content not only from the Globe--which originated, organized and anchors the site--but from more than 30 other Boston affiliates, ranging from other newspapers, magazines, radio and TV stations to museums, libraries, the local ballet and symphony orchestra, the Better Business Bureau and regional weather and traffic services.

“We decided we wanted to be the gateway to our region for news and information about our region,” says Lincoln Millstein, vice president for new media at the Globe.

When a hurricane began moving up the East Coast last winter, boston.com was able to supplement Globe and wire service reporting with audio feeds from radio station WBZ and video clips from television station WHDH so that online users could “see and hear what was happening in Georgia before the storm got near here,” says Gina Maniscalco, executive director of boston.com.

As with most newspaper Web sites, there is little or no Globe reporting done specifically for boston.com. But the staff of boston.com does supplement what’s in the paper. When the Globe published a series of articles in March on “Hidden Massachusetts”--the “poverty, abuse, violence and desperation” in rural Massachusetts--boston.com put up databases that enabled residents in each of the state’s 351 communities to find local statistics on everything from income and unemployment statistics to welfare caseloads, sex offender registration and child abuse complaint rates.

Online publication of such ambitious projects can give much wider exposure and recognition to a local or regional newspaper like the Globe. The printed edition of the Globe circulates almost exclusively in New England--mostly in Massachusetts--but 27% of the people who use boston.com live outside New England.

“Suddenly,” Millstein says, “the Boston Globe has an entirely new audience, far beyond where trucks can take the paper.”

Similarity Between Print, Online Image

The New York Times already has the kind of national audience that the Internet makes possible for the Globe and other papers. The Times sells about 40% of its newspapers outside its primary market area, so with the New York Times on the Web (the official name of the paper’s site), the Times is not seeking to extend its reach so much as it is seeking to extend its brand name into a new medium for the new millennium.

Toward that end--and in direct contrast to boston.com--the Web site for the New York Times probably resembles its print counterpart more than does any other major newspaper site.

“We want it to feel and look like the New York Times,” McKenna says.

The New York Times is generally recognized as the best and most authoritative paper in the country, and the people who run the paper want to take advantage of that reputation in their online edition.

The New York Times on the Web provides little original reporting--apart from the coverage of cyberspace in its daily CyberTimes section--but virtually the entire news and editorial content of the printed paper is available online without charge (except for international readers, who pay $35 a month). The Sunday magazine is not yet online, the bridge and chess columns and the crossword puzzle are available in a package for $9.95 a year, and the restaurant reviews are available through a separate Times site on America Online.

In April, the Sunday Book Review was added to the New York Times on the Web--and expanded upon. The site has 50,000 reviews dating back to 1980, and readers of a particular book review can find online reviews of other books by the same author, as well as articles on and interviews with that author--some of them gathered together in the original, multimedia biography “Life & Times” that the site puts up every week. Through RealAudio--and in cooperation with various organizations--the New York Times on the Web also makes available online readings by many authors, ranging from Vladimir Nabokov to Stephen King.

Ironically, in a newspaper known primarily for its text rather than its graphics, many of the online forums the Times conducts are organized around original, online photo essays on such subjects as the war in Bosnia to the landless workers in Brazil.

Earlier this year, Editor & Publisher, the trade magazine of the newspaper industry, named the New York Times on the Web the best overall online newspaper service among papers with more than 100,000 circulation. Editor & Publisher also said the New York Times on the Web had the best editorial content of any online paper in that size category.

The Times has not yet made its archives available online, largely because previous contracts under which the Times sells access to its archives to other online services have been very lucrative, says Bernard Gwertzman, editor of the New York Times on the Web. But negotiations now underway should bring at least a year’s worth of the paper’s archives to its Web site by late summer.

While the New York Times is relying on its reputation as the country’s newspaper of record and on its long tradition of general excellence and comprehensiveness to sustain it in the new medium, many other newspapers are trying to carve out specialized niches for their online editions.

Thorough Integration of 2 News Media

The Wall Street Journal, online as in print, is the preeminent specialized daily newspaper. But the Journal is “special” in more than its focus on the subject of business. Among other things, the Journal has integrated its print and online editions more thoroughly than most other papers. Editors even reconfigured the newsroom to include the staffs of both editions.

“Being that close, people [from the print staff] will come over and say, ‘Did you see this?” and “We’re working on that,’ ” says Neil Budde, editor of the paper’s online edition (officially known as the Wall Street Journal Interactive Edition). “Shortly after we launched, the print side said they were doing a story with a lot of documents on the tobacco industry, and we put the entire text of the documents online.”

The Journal Interactive Edition has also published the full text of many government economic reports that a print newspaper would have to ignore or, at best, excerpt.

Paul Steiger, managing editor of the Journal, says it is still “relatively rare” for a reporter on the print Journal to write a story exclusively for the online edition, but there have been “notable exceptions.” As at many other papers, online editors do attend the paper’s daily news conference, and several Journal columnists appear online regularly to answer questions and participate in chat sessions with readers.

“We’ve had amazing cooperation for the print edition, more than I expected,” says Tom Baker, business director of the Wall Street Journal Interactive Edition, and he attributes that in large measure to the attitude of Peter Kann, the publisher of the Journal, who made it clear from the beginning that “the online edition is the Journal, not some strange project.”

There isn’t much original reporting in the Journal’s online edition yet, Budde says, but he expects that to change as the edition matures. Even now, because the printed Journal only publishes Monday through Friday, there have been times when editors put a story online Saturday to avoid being beaten by the competition and having to wait until Monday to catch up.

The Dallas Morning News created quite a stir this year when it did something even more unusual. The paper got an exclusive story reporting that Timothy J. McVeigh had allegedly claimed responsibility for the Oklahoma City bombing, and it published the story on its Web site on a Friday afternoon rather than waiting to put it in the Saturday paper and risk being scooped by other media.

Newspapers are reluctant to, in effect, scoop themselves this way, but some East Coast papers now routinely take that chance, putting the next morning’s paper online late the previous night, early enough for editors on the West Coast to see those stories, have their reporters scurry for new information and match the stories in their morning editions.

But Dow Jones, the Journal’s parent company, has long had its own worldwide news service, as well as overseas editions of the Journal, “so we’ve been struggling with this problem for years,” Steiger says.

The Journal is different from most other newspapers in several other areas that have enormous implications for online publishing. Because it doesn’t publish much classified advertising, Baker says, the fear of losing that revenue was not the “driving force” behind the Journal’s online venture as it has been for most other newspapers.

“We wanted to see if we could reach a crowd of readers that we hadn’t reached before,” he says, “primarily younger readers with our [upscale] demographics who didn’t read our paper every day.”

So far, he says, that’s what’s happening: “Two-thirds of our subscribers on the Web are not print subscribers. . . . The median age of our Web subscribers is 40. In print, it’s 52.”

Of course, it’s early yet, and those numbers are based on a relatively small sample. The online edition has about 100,000 subscribers; the circulation of the printed Journal is 1.8 million.

But those 100,000 are paid subscribers, providing about 40% of the revenue for the online edition. (The fee is $49 a year--$29 for subscribers to the printed edition--compared with $175 for a printed subscription.)

One of the few online papers to charge for subscriptions, the Journal has substantially more paid subscribers than other major papers have free subscribers. The New York Times estimates that it has 80,000 users “on a good day,” the Boston Globe figures it averages about 73,000 users, the Los Angeles Times about 50,000.

Because so many online sites are free, in keeping with the basic culture of the Web, there is considerable doubt that most people will pay to read a newspaper online. But Dow Jones has long charged customers for some online material--information from its Dow Jones News Retrieval Service, for example--so “our prejudice was to charge readers,” Baker says.

Looking at Sites as Revenue Sources

Although no one has quite figured out yet how to advertise effectively on the Web, most newspaper and magazine executives--and most Internet professionals--think advertising will provide most of the revenue for online publications, much as it now does for traditional media.

Most newspaper executives are also looking at other online sources of revenue, including the development of electronic Yellow Pages and the possibility of serving as intermediaries in various consumer transactions. Most also believe they can charge for stories from their archives (as many papers already do), as well as for various other special services, features and / or personalized editions.

“We know those will be significant revenue streams down the pike,” says Peter Winter, president of Cox Interactive Media, a subsidiary of Cox Newspapers of Atlanta, publisher of the Atlanta Journal and Constitution, “but we expect to make most of our money from advertising.”

Although most online papers operate within the structural framework of their parent newspapers, Cox Interactive Media is an independent subsidiary of Cox Newspapers, “the only way,” Winter says, “to have a self-supporting business and avoid having a product that reflects a traditional media sensibility.”

Its first site, Access Atlanta, combines a city guide, profiles of local businesses, chat rooms, a travel guide and news from the Cox newspaper and radio and television stations in town. Cox has a similar service in Austin, Texas, and expects to be operational in 10 more areas--including Orange County, San Diego and San Francisco--by the end of summer.

With its stable of 19 newspapers, half a dozen TV stations, 38 radio stations and one of the nation’s largest cable systems, Cox hopes to be operating online city guides in 30 communities by year’s end, all of them featuring heavy user participation.

Although the online editions of the major daily newspapers generally draw the most attention, several smaller and medium-size papers are also among the leaders in Internet development.

Nando Times, a pioneering Web site, began as a largely local service with early content provided by the Raleigh News & Observer. But when the paper was purchased by the McClatchy group, Nando shifted its focus. Nando now provides links to all McClatchy papers--including the Sacramento, Fresno and Modesto Bees--and by the end of the summer, says Christian Hendricks, president and publisher of the Nando Times, the site will have several areas of joint coverage with those papers.

But the Nando Times is now primarily a global rather than local or regional site. Its news coverage has a heavy emphasis on national and international events and will soon be continually updated. Thirty percent of the visitors to nandotimes.com live outside the United States.

Like the Cox newspaper sites, the Arizona Daily Star site has made interactivity an integral part of its operation. Visitors to the site can click on stories that interest them to create their own “community front page,” and they can participate in online quizzes and polls embedded in the stories they are reading.

“Part of our mission is to provide a publishing platform for the entire community,” says Bob Cauthorn, director of new technology for the paper.

Cauthorn says his Web site is already profitable--”meaningfully profitable”--in part because it has created its own Internet service provider, the necessary link between the home computer and the Web, a service generally provided by technology companies or, in some cases, by telephone companies. Users can access the paper’s Web site without charge but if they want to contribute to it, either by selecting or commenting on stories for the community front page, they have to do so through the paper’s ISP, which costs $20 a month.

Other medium-size dailies with well-regarded Web sites include the San Jose Mercury News, Arizona Republic and Phoenix Gazette, Indianapolis Star/News, Minneapolis Star Tribune and New Jersey Online (which combines the efforts of several Advance Publications news organizations, the largest being the Newark Star Ledger).

But one of the most interesting experiments in online journalism is being conducted at the Houston Chronicle, which often sends reporters out with digital cameras and high-quality tape recorders to provide original, multimedia stories for its Web site.

One of the online paper’s most popular--and most innovative--multimedia features is “Virtual Voyager.” Chronicle reporters go out on a wide range of adventures and file multimedia, interactive reports to the paper’s Web site along the way. One reporter went to Australia with her daughter. Another went to China. Two other Chronicle reporters traveled Route 66 from Chicago to the West Coast with cameras mounted in the back seat. From the Grand Canyon, they provided 360-degree photos that gave users back home a real feel for the grandeur of the setting.

David Shaw’s e-mail address is david.shaw@latimes.com

Jacci Cenacveira and Rebecca Andrade of The Times editorial library assisted with the research for this series.

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Web Sites

These are the names and Internet addresses for the primary Web sites mentioned in today’s stories:

Arizona Daily Star

https://www.azstarnet.com

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Boston Globe

https://www.boston.com

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Chicago Tribune

https://www.chicago.tribune.com

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Cox Interactive Media

https://www.cimedia.com

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CyberWireDispatch

https://www.cyberwerks.com/cyberwire

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Dallas Morning News

https://www.dallasnews.com

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Houston Chronicle Interactive

https://www.chron.com

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Indianapolis Star and News

https://www.starnews.com

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Los Angeles Times

https://www.latimes.com

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Minneapolis Star Tribune

https://www.startribune.com

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Nando Times

https://www.nando.net.com

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New Jersey Online

https://www.nj.com

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New York Times

https://www.nytimes.com

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Phoenix Newspapers

https://www.azcentral.com

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San Jose Mercury News

https://www.mercurycenter.com

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Wall Street Journal Interactive Edition

https://www.wsj.com

Note: The Freeloader Web site (freeloader.com) mentioned in Sunday’s and Monday’s editions is no longer operating.

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About This Series

Sunday: A Times reporter--an admitted “technological idiot”--gropes his way through cyberspace, trying to come to terms with the Internet and its potential to revolutionize virtually everything we do.

Monday: Will the Internet ultimately replace newspapers and other traditional media--or will it give them an opportunity to reclaim the dominance they once enjoyed?

Today: Different strokes for different newspaper folks--a look at the strikingly divergent paths that various newspapers are taking in transferring their journalism to the World Wide Web.

Wednesday: Online magazines, online city guides and Microsoft’s drive for hegemony in cyberspace. But does WWW stand for “World Wide Web” or “World Wide Wait”?

Thursday: Can anyone make any money on the Internet? Will readers (and writers) like the computer screen as much as the printed page?

The entire series will be available Thursday on The Times Web site at https://www.latimes.com/media