 March 1996, Vol. 7, No. 3 
Cyber newsroom
Digital journalism means new rights -- and responsibilities
Rick Smolan is a persuasive guy.
A photographer, Smolan has talked a variety of people and businesses over the last decade into projects in which they might not have been a part had it not been for Smolan’s persistence.
Starting with the Day in the Life series of coffee-table books that spent 24 hours in some specific community, Smolan moved into photo-book-as-CD-ROM with Alice to Ocean in 1992. Based on work he had done for National Geographic, Alice chronicled the travels of a woman and a pack of camels across Australia.
Last year, Smolan sent a team of photographers to Vietnam. The result was not only a quality book and CD -- Passage to Vietnam -- but also a quality television program of the same name shown on the Public Broadcasting System nationwide.
This year, Smolan elected to move from CD-ROMs to the World-Wide Web. Marrying the premise of Day in the Life to the immediacy of the Internet, Smolan proposed to cover the community known as "cyberspace" as 24 hours moved around the globe on Feb. 8.
Though greater in magnitude, the 24 Hours in Cyberspace project was much like the Virtual Newsroom project that delivered whole newspaper pages devoted to the Super Bowl in a remote manner (see The Cole Papers, February 1992).
Interestingly, University of Wisconsin educator and consultant Kurt Foss was involved in both the Virtual Newsroom and Cyber24 projects. We thought it natural to ask him to give us a "behind the scenes" look at Cyber24, from the vantage point of Mission Control, which was based in San Francisco.
As Foss points out, Feb. 8 became an important date for the Internet not only because of the Cyber24 project, but also because that day President Clinton signed the telecommunications act -- which includes a provision for banning "indecent" material from the Internet.
Immediately following the bill’s signing, Web sites throughout the world turned their pages black for 48 hours in protest. Smolan had difficulty in reacting to the protests.
(In further protests, Dave Winer, the programmer who wrote the Frontier scripting environment for the Mac, set up 24 Hours of Democracy, a site that links more than 1000 essays about freedom from around the Web; it’s available at http://www.hotwired.com/userland/24/.)
Our next stop in the cyber newsroom is with the lawyers. It seems that many in the industry are imposing strict rules on newspapers that post to on-line databases (like Lexis-Nexis and DataTimes) or those that have Web sites.
The issue: Do you have permission to republish all your material, including that from wire services, syndicates and free-lance writers? (Here at The Cole Papers, our agreements have always acquired all rights.) L. Carol Christopher talks to executives, librarians and editors to find out how papers are responding.
And a newspaper can't get much more cyber-oriented than to start its own technology-based company on the side. The history of newspapers that have become suppliers is rich; I speak to executives at the Pottsville (Pa.) Republican, the Utah County Journal in Utah and the Lewiston Morning Tribune in Idaho about how they became providers as well as consumers.
And to wrap up, in Hellbox we have the latest on System Integrators Inc., Quark Inc. and the completed merger of Autologic and Information International.
The 24 Hours in Cyberspace project teaches us that immediate journalism is something we who have come from print are going to have to learn.
The 24 Hours of Democracy project teaches us that we still have the responsibilities -- and the rights -- that we've always had.
-- David M. Cole
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