Serving as interim chief executive of NCN will be Peter Winter, the vice president of market development at Cox. A search is under way for a permanent CEO.

"We believe it will change the face of the newspaper industry," Winter told the Dow Jones News Service.

Each newspaper would be responsible for setting its own costs for subscribing or advertising in its on-line edition, Winter told the New York Times. He also said it would be each paper's responsibility to determine whether it wished to go into the Internet service-provider business, or to subcontract Internet access to a local or national service provider.

Winter further told the Times that the company would have about 10 employees, five of whom would be technicians. Other reports indicated the company would be based in a centrally located city, such as Atlanta or Dallas.

Executives of the founding companies told reporters at the Newspaper Association of America's annual meeting April 24 in New Orleans that the companies had each authorized up to $1 million to fund the start-up.

Charles Brumback, the chief executive of Tribune Co., told reporters that at least a dozen papers had called Tribune executives asking to be included in the venture.

In a related development about on-line activities, Louis Boccardi, the president and CEO of the Associated Press, announced at the NAA meeting that the cooperative would ease its restrictions for use of the AP wire's content in on-line publishing ventures.

Boccardi told the publishers that the nonprofit organization would lift all restrictions on the amount of AP copy that a newspaper can use in its on-line service and that it would extend the length of time a paper can keep AP copy in an on-line database -- now six months -- to two years, without charge.

"We take both these steps to foster your experimentation with the new medium as we work with you to determine how AP can best support it," Boccardi said.

The NCN announcement was bracketed by two other Internet-newspaper revelations:

What's it all mean?
Many of the issues about NCN became clear in talking to Ingle, the longtime San Jose editor who was a founder of Mercury Center (which has evolved from a forum on America Online to encompass audiotext, fax-on-demand and the World-Wide Web) and who was subsequently put in charge of new media for all of Knight-Ridder.

The first question that came to mind was why World-Wide Web-based newspapers needed standards. Data exchange on the Web is handled by the Hypertext Transport Protocol (Http). It and the method used to display data on the screen of a personal computer -- the Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) -- are both internationally agreed-upon standards.

"The Web has standards? Bullshit," said Ingle. "There's TCP/IP and that's the only real standard." TCP/IP stands for Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol -- the standard used to route data packets on networks.

In addition, Ingle said, there are at least two potential standards for secured transactions -- that is, encrypting credit card data so that it can't be read while in transit -- and that despite the HTML "standard," each browser application seems to display data on a computer screen differently.

Ingle said newspapers need a common way to handle the business aspects of the World-Wide Web.

"It's not so much the publishing stuff as the plug-ins and modules," he said. "The credit card billing stuff."

Ingle also pointed to the need to make moving from one newspaper to another seamless.

"We want to make it possible for a customer to go off to another member of the network to do some transactions and not have to do any registering" at the new newspaper, he said.

Another area for standards, said Ingle, is search engines "for classifieds and stuff." He suggested that a common user interface among member newspapers would enable users to look for information more easily.

Ingle envisions one solution to the problem of HTML as being able to dictate the browser software his customers use.

"I'm going to ship a client," he said, referring to the browser software. "I can't really have them transact business without my client."

Ingle anticipates that customers of NCN papers "wouldn't really know they're on the Internet," and that the software he would like to send to customers would configure a computer to run the World-Wide Web "with just a few clicks."

Ingle suggested that the only way to make the common "plug-ins" (also known as computer gateway interfaces, or CGIs) work is to have a common set of server software -- though he wouldn't say whether that software would be Netscape's, Open Market's or some other.

"If possible," Ingle said, "we'd like to not be wed to one of those vendors forever."

One of the problems with using a common server solution is that those in which NCN members have investments run only under UNIX -- and most smaller papers just don't have UNIX-savvy technicians on-staff.

"For smaller independents," said Ingle, "they'll band together and do a service bureau type operation. We would just host them somewhere else."

With data communications, he noted, smaller papers could upload their Web pages to this centralized server.

Another question yet to be answered is how to charge for information on the Internet -- the custom of the 'Net being that information is free.

Ingle said that "we'll all struggle to find that balance" between free and paid information, but that "it ain't all going to be free."

The erstwhile free Mercury Center was a case in point. Two weeks into charging a subscription fee for accessing Mercury Center on the World-Wide Web, Ingle said he was "very happy" with customer response.

"We have had way less flaming than I had been expecting," he said, using the Internet term for hate mail.

Part of the problem is that some information providers -- Ingle cited comic strip syndicates -- demand payment for usage.

"I cannot get the rights to a lot of information if I have the door open free to the Internet," he said.

As one of the founders of the NCN, it's not surprising that Ingle is high on the project. NCN will mean "it's never been easier" for a paper to have an on-line presence, he predicted.

At the same time, Ingle was adamant about what NCN would not do.

"What's not there is that there are no understandings about the exchange of content, there's only facilitations on the interface issues," he said. "There was a lot of back-and-forth" on the content-exchange issue, Ingle said.

"All kinds of private or separate deals may be made. Companies that sell content in the form of wire services will stay the same; what constitutes a wire service might change."

-- dmc

From THE COLE PAPERS, May 1995, Copyright © 1995, All Rights Reserved.