Salon magazine Archives - Author JD Lasica

Personal media, contrarian journalism provide counterweights to Eastern media’s groupthink

By J.D. Lasica
Online Journalism Review

Less than three years ago, a case could be made that the West — particularly the greater San Francisco Bay Area — had become ground zero of the new media revolution.

New York and its cadre of elite corporate media were latecomers to the Net party and, in the eyes of the digerati, worse than clueless. Irrelevant.

Meanwhile, way out West, Wired magazine and its dazzling digital sibling, HotWired, became the instant bible of the fevered plugged-in crowd — those who got it, who understood that the Internet would change everything. Salon magazine, and then Slate, fashioned ambitious sites that were vibrant, smart and required reading — everything the establishment media was not. The Industry Standard (and, at the end, its terrific Web site) came out of nowhere to become the best publication covering the new economy. Business 2.0 wasn’t far behind. Other Bay Area tech magazines — Upside, Red Herring, InfoWorld, PC World — invested in online staffs operating well-done Web sites.

CNET powered its way to become the premier tech news site. More people were reading Yahoo! News than the top 20 online newspapers combined. TechTV and its companion Web site hoped to bring computer news and how-to advice to the cable masses. eCompany Now scrambled onto the Bay Area scene in early 2000, paying its top writers six figures. Knight Ridder Digital moved its headquarters from Miami to San Jose to get closer to the heart of the action. Startups in Silicon Valley, San Francisco, Los Angeles and Redmond, Wash. — many of them content sites (MSNBC, Amazon, ThirdAge, BabyCenter, Women.com, Adam.com, LookSmart, ThemeStream) or service journalism sites (eHow, ExpertCity, Sidewalk, CitySearch) — had begun dotting the media landscape like buttercups. [Read more…] about Why the Wired West still matters

The digital attic has begun collecting and storing scraps of our lives — forever

This column appeared in the June 1998 issue of The American Journalism Review. For a more thorough look at this issue, see my article in Salon (with errant formatting given that they’ve switched publishing systems).

Gigabytes have been written about the digital revolution, but little attention has been paid to one of its most potentially profound social changes: The Internet doesn’t forget. Memories fade, but electronic archives are turning fleeting snapshots of our past lives into permanent records that may follow us forever.

And that has enormous consequences for us as communicators, journalists and citizens.

The common perception is that the Web is a fragile creature filled with dead links, “404 Not Found” error messages, hasty e-mails and other transient digital debris. Indeed, leading figures on the Net have bemoaned the wholesale loss of the Web’s early years, such as many of the political sites devoted to the ’96 election.

But efforts are under way to change all that. Brewster Kahle of San Francisco, inventor of several Internet search engines, is trying to collect, store and catalog the entire World Wide Web and all 33,000 Usenet newsgroups. Kahle’s nonprofit Internet Archive and more recent Alexa project are out to become the modern equivalent of the Library of Alexandria: the repository of all the world’s public digital information. To date he’s copied and stored some 8 trillion bytes of words, images and sounds (compared to 20 trillion in the Library of Congress). [Read more…] about The Net has forgotten how to forget

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Personal media, contrarian journalism provide counterweights to Eastern media’s groupthink

The digital attic has begun collecting and storing scraps of our lives — forever

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