INTERVIEWS
Ted Koppel
Net Gain continued
Furuly, a staff reporter for Aftenposten, Norway's leading newspaper, had been writing articles for four years on such subjects as cyberporn, hate groups and Norwegian Satanists on the Net. That led to "some really serious waves of flame mails," he reports in an e-mail interview.
But he was unprepared for the fallout from his Dec. 29 piece, which resulted in the University of Oslo shutting down their IRC server for more than two weeks. "The reaction to my article was nearly unbelievable. Some Net dinosaurs started a campaign to get me sacked from the paper. One of them started a watch-group project on the World Wide Web."
For the next seven months, Furuly's critics operated a home page that was the digital headquarters for Furuly-Watch, a site that kept tabs on every word Furuly wrote.
Erik Naggum, a computer software businessman, says he created the site because the reporter "is notorious for articles devoid of fact but filled with strong opinions about issues he does not understand.
"As far as I know, mine is the only voice of criticism toward journalists that tries to document the specific offenses committed by them," he says by e-mail. "I got famous instantly in the entire Norwegian press corps for even hinting that a journalist had a bad track record. It appears that criticizing a journalist is on a par with killing him in the line of duty."
As more newspapers set up shop on the Web, such culture clashes between reader and reporter are inevitable. A lot of built-in animosity and skepticism awaits journalists in cyberspace. Consider this sampling of attitudes from ordinary citizens (all of whom agreed to have their names published) who posted messages in online discussion forums:
Norman Edwards, a semi-retired lawyer-businessman in Newton, Mass., writes: "The Internet is our last hope for a medium that will enable individuals to combat the overpowering influence of the commercial media to shape public opinion, voter attitudes, select candidates, influence legislation, etc."
Xerxes, a.k.a. Scott Finer, a telecommunications consultant in Arlington, Va., writes: "On the Net, I want to read the views of the experts themselves who make the news. I am, in fact, often annoyed by the interpretation supplied by the intervening journalist. Too often journalists — particularly broadcast journalists — advertise 'balanced content' yet deliver hidden agendas wrapped in cleverly modulated spin. Their claims of 'balance' make me hoot."
Alan McConnell, who runs a computer consulting services firm in Silver Spring, Md., writes: "Journalism, at present, is stuck in its 'paid for by advertisers' mode. It had to be, in the era of chopped wood, 20-foot-high presses, phalanxes of delivery trucks. But, as we all realize, we have new technology now. Every person can indeed be a journalist. There is a great opportunity here for readers to get their news untainted by advertising. ... It will be amateurish, annoying, copious, misleading and chaotic, but I find that preferable to slick, annoying, selective, misleading, trendy. And there are MILLIONS of me out there."
Those rafts of fed-up news consumers now have other options.
MTV's secret? It doesn't talk down to the young. It doesn't dismiss their interests as unimportant. It presents information in an eye-catching way. And recently, it has begun to let its viewers participate in the news.
Two summers ago MTV ran promos touting its new first-person news program told through the lens of a participant in the story. The network was deluged with 12,000 calls.
Steven Rosenbaum, executive producer of "MTV News Unfiltered," says in a phone interview: "Part of what's changing in society is this top-down model where the media decide what's important and spoonfeed it to a docile, accepting public. That's becoming obsolete, and a lot of people in journalism find that threatening. But all that's really happening is we're allowing the audience to participate in the news. That doesn't make us any less important, it just changes our role."
Here's how it works: Rosenbaum's staff of story coordinators sort through viewers' phone calls, about 2,500 a week. They green-light 40 of the most promising subjects, help focus the story with each caller, then send out 40 camcorders so viewers can produce their own stories in the field. From that pool, the producers pick five segments per show to air.
Rosenbaum admits the show's title shouldn't be taken literally. "We have a half hour. Call it what you will — a funnel, a strainer — there is a selection process. But all the segments chosen are important, insightful stories that would never find a place in the conventional news media."
The show, which aired in limited runs in July 1995 and last April, is rough and raw but real. It has won critical praise and "fantastic" viewer response, Rosenbaum says.
He recalls one segment in which a young teenage girl proposed a story about a friend's suicide. "One of our producers wanted to know why this kid killed himself. Well, that's not what the girl wanted to do. It would have been very easy for us to use our expertise as journalists as a cudgel to say, 'You're not getting the story right, Missy.' "Instead, we let her do her own piece, a very moving, strong piece of television about how this teen's suicide affected this group of 14-year-olds. And we never found out what pushed this kid. When we showed it at a screening for a group of broadcast executives, four of them were in tears. If just a few kids in the audience saw the depth of despair in the piece and learned something from it, then it was worth it."
Rosenbaum has fought a running battle with broadcasters over the notion of news. "Before MTV signed us, I had three offers to do the show elsewhere, including one of the networks. But we turned them down because nobody would call it news. That word was so sacred that no one was willing to say that what the audience had to say was equally important to what we in the profession considered news."
It's a notion that may be changing. National Public Radio's "All Things Considered,'' for example, has repeatedly dipped into the pool of viewer-based news in recent months. In March it ran "Remorse,'' turning over the tape recorder to two youths who reported on two young boys in Chicago who dangled and dropped a 5-year-old to his death from a tenement window. In April it launched a series of first-person Teenage Diaries, including a story by a gay teenage girl growing up in a conservative Catholic family.
Old Media had better get used to the idea, Rosenbaum says. "A lot of us have gotten hung up on the rules of balance and objectivity we learned in journalism school. I've been described as the devil incarnate, because we run stories where those things don't come into play. We think the audience is sophisticated enough to tell the difference between an objective and subjective story. To me, the idea of storytelling as a profession that best not be tried in your own home is a dangerous and sad state of affairs."
He has this parting advice: "When all is said and done, 'Unfiltered' is based on the simple act of answering the telephone and interacting with your viewers. With the Internet, the online services and the potential for interactive television, viewers are going to have a channel into newsrooms. They want to talk to us. The question is, Are we willing to listen?"
This is, after all, a medium that was built from the grassroots up. No corporate financing. No silver-maned publishers, broadcasters or cable bigwigs calling the shots. Consumers drive this baby.
Journalists cling to the conceit that we're at the center of the media universe. But the harsh reality is that, for many, the press is expendable. Increasingly, citizens are bombarded with news and information from all directions: morning news shows, talk radio, magazines, newsletters, tabloid TV. And now, the Net.
The digital age is turning middlemen everywhere into endangered species. Already, travel agents, stock brokers, traders, Realtors, bank tellers and insurance brokers are polishing up their resumes. Some believe that journalists — the middlemen in the news equation — may be next.
For die-hard Netheads who want to play reporter, the Internet is the ultimate news-you-can-use machine. It's a world library (even if all the books are on the floor), filled with tens of thousands of specialty nooks and niches. Experts in the field of law, the economy, education, politics, the arts are all accessible online — without the need for a journalist as mediator.
Even for breaking news, many people turn not to the mainstream media but to the Usenet, Internet Relay Chat and other wired forums for news about events like the 1994 earthquake in Northridge, Calif., the Oklahoma City bombing and the arrest of the Unabomber.
Art Nauman, ombudsman for The Sacramento Bee, says he has encountered an entirely new class of readers since he obtained an e-mail account last year "Clearly, it's not just the uninformed who aren't picking us up. For growing numbers of young people especially, we're not relevant."
"Newspapers and broadcast media will be with us for a very long time," says Kevin Kelly, editor of Wired, the bible of the digerati. "The Net doesn't obliterate Old Media, it merely redefines it. It will liberate newspapers from some of their stale habits and enable them to try new, more creative approaches to communicating with their readers.
"The real phenomenon of the Net is micro-publishing, micro-audiences, micro-markets. Whatever obsession you have — taboo sites, roadkill sites, the most socially unacceptable things you can imagine — you can find somebody out there who's doing it. Certainly the Roadkill Newsletter is not going to take away your appetite for a broader world view. The Web won't replace Old Media. But it will add greatly to the diversity of viewpoints."
Rheingold agrees. "The Internet changes the media equation, and it's very simple: If you want to publish a newspaper, you need trucks, barrels of ink, big printing machines, capital. If you just want to publish the news, all you need is a computer and a telephone, and you can go online and provide an eyewitness account of the massacre at Tiananmen Square. The Internet puts the masses back in mass media.
"Does that mean that the Hearsts and Murdochs and Turners of the world will wither away and disappear? No way. But they won't have a monopoly on the news, either. If you're a writer or playwright or restaurateur, the newspaper of record can make you or break you. That kind of dominance is a scary thing. To my mind, a multiplicity of voices is far, far healthier."
Now that the Web has reached its toddler stage, those one-person sites and little zines are still there. But they're mostly leading a lonely digital existence.
"At the beginning I thought a bunch of kids in a garage somewhere would put out a kick-ass publication that challenged The New York Times and reduced it to rubble," says Joshua Quittner, executive producer of The Netly News, a media review on the Pathfinder Web site. "But where's the real journalism on the Net? Where's the challenger to CNN? The cost of doing world coverage is so huge, it's not going to come from some kids in their garage. The most successful model is Suck, and that's a couple of guys doing a sarcastic essay a day."
Linda Nelson, vice president of new media for Stern Publishing, which owns The Village Voice, agrees. "Kids in a garage? I don't see that happening. The best of the online magazines — Urban Desires, Word, Total New York, Salon — face the same realities that publications face in the real world. It takes a lot of money and talent to put out a quality product."
Nelson says the Net has already changed the balance of power between the establishment media and alternative weeklies such as the Boston Phoenix, LA Weekly, Chicago Reader, San Francisco Bay Guardian and others. "The alternatives are all doing much better jobs on the Web than their corporate counterparts. For us, it's a perfect fit. The Web offers a perfect medium for the attitude and irony and the more personal, sophisticated writing style you see in community newspapers."
Giant non-news outfits such as Microsoft with its Citiscape project, America Online with its Digital Cities effort, Mr. Showbiz, AT&T, IBM and others have also begun to make inroads onto traditional media's turf by carving out niches of entertainment, sports or business news for their online users. Bigger may not be better, but it commands more attention.
Strikingly, even the alternative press has begun to climb aboard a corporate platform. The Village Voice already has a music site on the Microsoft News Network, which Nelson calls "a great new visibility tool." And she sees further alliances ahead for alternative papers, MSN and other powerhouses like AOL or Netscape.
One factor driving this trend toward large, brand-name Web identities is that the online community itself is changing.
Elizabeth Weise, national cyberspace writer for The Associated Press, observes: "In the past year especially, with commercial services like America Online and Prodigy pulling people onto the Internet, people are coming to the Net for fundamentally different reasons than before. Up until recently the Net was this sort of Socratic debating society, with a lot of discussion, argument, interaction. It was like those pro-democracy wall posters in China. Today, all those posters are covered with ads for Nike, Sony and Coca Cola. And that's pretty much what's happening on the Web, too."
Sandy Reed, editor of the computer trade journal InfoWorld and its online component InfoWorld Electric, agrees. "The Net is becoming less of a novelty and more of a business tool. As it becomes mainstream, the character of most of the Net is changing. There will always be outposts of ideology, but the majority of the Net is putting on a suit."
If it's putting on a suit, it's wearing a Jerry Garcia tie.
And the ties come in a million different colors.
Some online users have written off the traditional news media entirely. David Kline, a veteran journalist and co-author of "Road Warriors: Dreams and Nightmares Along the Information Highway," says a fringe element is particularly vocal: "Usenet is full of paranoid psychotics who believe the chairman of General Motors goes over all the copy before it gets printed in The New York Times every day. They see the Net as their license to rant and spew." Enter a Usenet discussion group, identify yourself as a reporter, and watch the flames light up your screen.
A more sizable number of Netizens are burrowers, or tunnelers. They prefer journalists in the background, pointing to multiple sources and conflicting accounts while providing little or no summary or interpretation. They often have an intense interest in a particular subject, and they like to sift the raw information for themselves, often tunneling through layers of data to draw their own conclusions.
Increasingly, though, the Net is attracting more and more data-skimmers. Casual online users, they want their news tamed, filtered and summarized, quickly and cleanly. They don't have time to play reporter.
But they do want news organizations to change some of their shopworn habits.
Kelly, the editor of Wired, says, "Many people don't want the topdown news force-fed them by the media. But in my experience, when they get an unfiltered variety of news, they don't want that either. If you don't have good editors and writers and institutional trust in place, you get a kind of news that's more noisy and not as trustworthy.
"I think what people want is a directed news that aims higher than the lowest-common-denominator kind of news that some of the mass media cater to."
Culture clash: When worlds collide
Jan Gunnar Furuly thought it was business as usual when he filed a story last December detailing how some Internet Relay Chat channels were used to trade child pornography.
Unfiltered news: One approach
The old joke in newsrooms was that "MTV News" is an oxymoron. But the joke's not so funny anymore, now that most young people get their news from nontraditional sources — including MTV — rather than from their local paper or TV newscast.
Goodbye, Gutenberg?
It should come as no surprise that a large number of Netizens have manned the virtual ramparts against Big Media's incursion into cyberspace.
younger, well-educated, and avid news junkies. "There are an awful lot of people out there who can do without us very nicely," he says, pointing to declining newspaper readership figures in most of the major markets.
More voices, more choices
So, is it time to close up shop and ask cousin Charlie about that job opening in PR? Not so fast.
Who's on the playing field
There was a time when starry-eyed Netizens envisioned a counterculture media universe flowering with a million small, personal, way cool Web sites. The genius and triumph of the Internet, after all, is the fact that the humblest home page is as accessible as the slickest corporate site.
A morphing online universe
The Internet is going Main Street and Madison Avenue.
Ranters, burrowers and skimmers
When it comes to the Net, many mainstream media organizations mistakenly take a one-size-fits-all approach. But Netizens come in all flavors.
NEXT: What journalism can bring to the Net — and what the Net can bring to journalism
Resources:
Jan Gunnar Furuly's e-mail address
Erik Naggum's e-mail address
Norman Edwards' e-mail address
Xerxes' e-mail address
Alan McConnell's e-mail address
MTV
National Public Radio
Art Nauman's e-mail address
The Sacramento Bee
Kevin Kelly's e-mail address
Wired
Joshua Quittner's e-mail address
The Netly News
Pathfinder
Linda Nelson's e-mail address
The Village Voice
Salon
Boston Phoenix
LA Weekly
Chicago Reader
San Francisco Bay Guardian
America Online
Mr. Showbiz
AT&T
IBM
Microsoft News Network
Netscape
Elizabeth Weise's e-mail address
Prodigy
InfoWorld Electric
"Road Warriors: Dreams and Nightmares Along the Information Highway"
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