Vol. 5, No. 11, November 1994

On-line ennui

If we're not careful, new media could be more boring than print

The last time we devoted any particular attention to on-line newspapers, we dumped on Mercury Center -- the San Jose Mercury News' pioneering effort on America Online -- for some typographical errors in the service. Many stories were picking up artifacts of typesetting, such as jumplines and captions.

Bob Hucker, then the paper’s systems editor, took umbrage at our observations, saying the system "isn't designed to replace the printed page, and nobody is methodically going to read the whole paper on-line."

At the time I said to myself, "Well, if it’s not designed to be read from cover-to-cover, what is the design?"

I think I then probably became more concerned about the next supplier to file Chapter 11 or something, and moved on. But it’s time to start thinking about on-line again -- the agreements newspapers made a year ago to go on-line are now beginning to produce on-line newspapers.

Poised to appear on the commercial services within weeks are the Los Angeles Times (Prodigy), the Washington Post (Ziff-Davis Interchange), Newsday (Prodigy) and the Star Tribune of Minneapolis (Ziff).

Inside, Correspondent John Bryan talks with a few of the editors who are supporting on-line services to gauge how much time they devote to maintaining their cyberspace domains.

Bryan’s interviews, and most other recent literature on the subject, make it obvious that the main thrust of an on-line publication must be its interactivity -- its relationship with its readers.

Well, if that’s the case, it seems to me that most papers don't need a company like Prodigy Services of White Plains, N.Y., (a joint venture of IBM and Sears) to take more than 50 percent of the on-line readers' revenue -- a newspaper could set up a more than adequate system on its own.

Which is why we had Chris Feola toying with some bulletin board software for the last month or so in order to give you his opinion. The newsroom technology guy at the Waterbury (Conn.) Republican-American, Feola is a dyed-in-the-wool Windows guru, but I persuaded him to at least talk about one Macintosh BBS in addition to three DOS or Windows products.

The key to a BBS is to realize that the computer hardware, software and telephone connections are very minor expenses -- it’s the interactivity with the users (readers?) and the choice of material to upload that costs money.

Ah, the choice of material: who in your newsroom is best suited to know all the components of your paper, whether they're sports stories, fashion pictures or news graphics? It’s your librarian.

Which is why I thought it would be a good idea to reprint Nora Paul’s interviews with five newspaper library directors. Inside, you'll find the Poynter Institute’s expert on libraries discussing with her colleagues what to provide readers (users?) in an on-line system.

And to wrap us up, Frequent Contributor Neil Chase -- consultant, man-about-the-on-line-services -- discusses the sixth annual Electronic Photo Workshop, held Sept. 26-30 in Chapel Hill, N.C. In his first couple of visits to the Electronic Times, Chase was a reporter for this august journal; in recent years he has been dragooned into serving on the faculty as well.

What does the Electronic Times have to do with on-line? Everything: It was published on CompuServe, PressLink and the Internet long before the press rolled in North Carolina.

It’s obvious that despite the fact that on-line services have yet to make money, it’s the direction we should all be headed; this is still a learning experience.

And if there’s but one lesson to be learned, it’s that the on-line papers and magazines that listen to their readers will be successes in this new form of publishing.

-- David M. Cole

From THE COLE PAPERS, November 1994, Copyright (c) 1994, All Rights Reserved.