An Aggressive, Multimedia Presence on the Web

Tribune Co., publisher of the Chicago Tribune, is investing $15 million to $20 million in its interactive media division this year, making it probably the most aggressive and well-financed program of any paper in the country.

The Tribune is trying to “leverage the many pairs of feet we have on the street in editorial and advertising,” says Owen Youngman, director of interactive media for the paper, and it is precisely those “many pairs of feet” that have helped make the Tribune one of the most highly regarded papers on the Net.

The online Tribune routinely uses audio interviews from the company’s radio station and video clips from its cable TV station, as well as the material that appears in the daily newspaper--and an increasing amount of original material produced by the online staff. During the National Basketball Assn. playoffs, a reporter covered the Bulls full time for the paper’s Web site.

Some print journalists view their online colleagues with a mixture of suspicion (“Are they going to make me obsolete?”), resentment (“Are they going to lower our journalistic standards and spend our news department’s money?”) and disdain (“What they’re doing is technology, not journalism”). The potential split between online and print staffs is exacerbated at most papers by simple logistics: These papers house their online staffs on different floors, or in different buildings, than the staff of the printed newspaper; the two staffs of the Washington Post actually work in different cities, about five miles apart.

In an effort to break down such barriers, the Tribune is now building a multimedia newsroom, with its own TV production studio, to accommodate the staffs of its various journalistic enterprises. When the newsroom is completed, probably in late summer or early fall, representatives of the cable TV station and the online paper will sit alongside Tribune editors on the paper’s assignment desk.

The goal, says Howard Tyner, editor of the Tribune, is to “move beyond putting out a newspaper every day and then having a bunch of people trying to figure out how to translate it to another medium. . . . We want to begin thinking, when stories are created and assigned, how to create them in the different media.”

Because many Tribune reporters have appeared often on the company’s cable TV station, which has had a permanent camera position in the newsroom since 1993, there has been considerably less anxiety there than at many other papers about the latest “new medium.”

On some stories, chicago.tribune.com already “beats” its print parent. When Tribune columnist Mike Royko, a Chicago icon, died last month, the online paper published his obituary, complete with audio and video material, as soon as the death was announced, 12 hours before the printed paper hit the streets. When the printed paper was published, it included--in the space where Royko’s column usually appeared--a number of messages that readers had posted on the paper’s electronic bulletin board when they read the obituary online.

The Tribune has also worked hard to create interactive features online. When the paper published a 10-page special section last July on how airlines have cut costs by not having certain kinds of lifesaving equipment on-board, readers could go to the online version of the stories and see which airlines and airplanes, flying which routes, carried which pieces of equipment--and how far passengers would be from that equipment in hospitals at various points along the ground on the route the airplanes would take.

In addition to the original text explanation of, say, how a defibrillator gives an electric shock that restarts a heart, the online series enabled readers to click on pictures and watch a doctor demonstrate how the machine works.

Like most newspapers, the Tribune does not charge for access to its Web site. Nor is there a charge for access to the paper’s archives, back to 1985. Readers can look at the headlines and first paragraphs of any story in that period without charge. But they have to pay $1.95 for the full text of any story in the archives.

“My philosophy,” Youngman says, “is that if we put up something that I say is interesting, it’s free, but if you think something is interesting and I haven’t put it up, we’ll charge a modest fee to give it to you.”