Todd talks: In a special coast-to-coast video hookup, rock 'n' roll artist Todd Rundgren talked to the Founder's Conference in a TV studio about new media and his own song-distribution web site, PatroNet.

Photo by Chris Gulker

An unusual session addresses folklore, communities, on-line

RESTON, Va. -- "Think" admonished the tiny gold letters beaming from the black leatherette notebook, an artifact of my father's days as an IBM systems developer -- a fitting prop for three days of idea exchange at the Founder's Conference for the American Press Institute's Media Center.

Thinking and talking was the simple agenda set for Oct. 26-28 by Media Center Director Christopher Feola for more than 40 lively minds from academia, media corporations, technology suppliers and the journalism trade press.

What could folklorist Lydia Fish and journalism terrorist Joshua Quittner offer Knight-Ridder technology chief Bob Ingle or Newspaper Association of America standards-bearer Eric Wolferman? What pleasant chat would Msnbc's Lynn Povich have with the Associated Press's Jim Kennedy? Would revenue realists like New Century Network's Susan Bokern cross swords with news purists like our own L. Carol Christopher?

What could scattershots by outspoken media practitioners (including four Cole Group associates) yield if not a ricochet of ideas? (Although everyone spoke up, we can't deliver here as thoroughly as the Web can. Check the guest list, sound bites and action shots at http://www.mediacenter.org/founders/covindex.htm.)

By gathering his favorite thinkers, the new Media Center director said he wanted the conference to identify ways that the center can be a stew pot of ingenuity. "It was kicking off the Media Center," Feola said, "and what the Media Center will be and what the Media Center will do."

In the Founder's Conference's wake, "what we're discussing is not having a single conference next year, (instead) having six working weekends ... one every other month, with leading people in the industry and leading people in other disciplines talking about on-line classifieds, the grammar of new media, database and storytelling technologies combined," Feola said. "And we're going to try to break ground in those areas."

Break new ground is what the underwriter, the Robert R. McCormick Tribune Foundation, intends to do with a $729,000 grant to "provide a series of forums for discussion of best practices and achievable futures through annual gatherings of leading media thinkers and consultation with individual newspapers and newspaper groups."

Eroding access in the Information Age
After participants toured the Freedom Forum's multimedia playground, the Newseum in Arlington, Va., the promoter of "free speech, free press and free spirit" kicked off the thinkfest Sunday with warnings about commercial control over information.

The forum's coordinator of special projects, Gene Policinski, pointed out that delivery mechanisms such as on-line services and alphanumeric pagers turn basic information into cash-value products. Take sports scores and statistics, that gray wallpaper of sports sections. Some organizations are asserting their ownership, and thus control, over material that journalists consider public domain.

Aside from sex sites, on-line sports "is where the money is right now. It's bringing in money, it's bringing in people," Policinski said. Media organizations see dollars in those web site hits and merchandise spots, and so do team owners, who object to newspapers' team-themed sites, unlicensed play-by-play postings, even reuse of players' photos.

Policinski said owners contend that "we license hats, we license shirts, we're going to license the news," or at least the data that the media turn into sports reports.

In a U.S. District Court case decided earlier this year, the National Basketball Association sought to bar Motorola and Stats Inc. from transmitting real-time game updates to pagers. The judge concluded that, because competition results are serendipitous, the teams can't own the game outcome, and ruled in favor of the paging partners. (For the legalese, see http://www.netlaw.com/cases/nbamotor.HTML).

"That's a victory for those of us who believe it should be in the public interest," Policinski said, but it doesn't protect other sports content, such as team photos and logos.

"You see a tightening around publication when you can no longer use images," said Policinski. "If Congress tried to do what the NBA wanted to do, there would have been a huge litigation," but the clash received little notice because sports is on the fringe of serious news.

It's a case of teams (and movie theaters and ticketing agencies) finding bigger benefit in launching their own web sites than in using media outlets. "We're beginning to see that factor circle around and squeeze off" the free flow of information, Policinski said.

Media operations need to examine their behavior toward competitors, for "we are not without sin," he said. Examples: The Washington press corps' bar against credentials for journalists who only work on-line, and NBC's effort to keep on-line reporters out of Ncaa basketball tournaments, since it bought both broadcast and on-line rights.

And what about selling information? Jean Gaddy Wilson, director of the University of Missouri's New Directions for News, sparred with Washington Post datamistress Margot Williams over whether news organizations can cry "foul" about paying for information if they peddle their own archives.

New ways to tell stories, to get paid
Maybe it was Bloody Monday stock market jitters, but the Monday morning discussion became a stream-of-consciousness angst session: publishers who "don't get it," competition from successful Internet and multimedia products, low pay and thin resources, minuscule R&D funding and little adventurous investment from traditional news organizations. Interspersed were fresh exchanges on how on-line functions foster communities and ways that the new media change storytelling.

Folklorist Lydia Fish, a professor at Buffalo (N.Y.) State College, tickled brain cells by describing how affinity groups capture their stories, such as soldiers' ditties about their wartime conditions. Vietnam-era satire songs like "The Five O'Clock Follies" are the brothers to ancient oral histories, she noted.

Even when official channels tailor the news, informal channels will trickle out the truth, she said. "You can't fight the folk."

On-line, folks cluster around ideas, issues and interests, instead of geographic identities that newspapers have historically traded upon. Chat rooms and newsgroups convene tribes that are much more economical for marketing purposes than land-based micro-zoning.

"We are sort of flying in the face of print," Owen Youngman, director of interactive media for the Chicago Tribune, said of his efforts to reach micro instead of mass markets. He likened the on-line exchange between audience and news producers to the face-to-face intimacy of town meetings, now so popular at metropolitan newspapers. The two-way channel improves the "take" part of the give-and-take relationship.

Tribune staff say, "we're here to listen, to let you beat us up a little bit, then we'll take your ideas" back to the office, Youngman said. It's not what people are used to, he said, and it's a big public relations hit with groups. "People start to view us not as the interlopers from downtown."

Dale Peskin, assistant managing editor of the Dallas Morning News, underscored one peril of hosted chat, that the newspaper brings new respectability to uninformed opinion. The traditional journalist's role is to provide meaning and understandability, while chat forums abound in mouthing off (what "Netly News" editor Joshua Quittner likened to "belligerent drunks at a cocktail party") without assurance of context or accuracy.

As Steve Ross, new media guru at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in New York, stressed, "If we don't bring quality to this business, somebody else will, and we're not going to like it."

One advantage of new communications technology, especially hyperlinked media such as the World-Wide Web, is that storytelling gains dimensionality. Reader contributions -- the new folklore -- are stars in a story constellation that includes official documents, video and audio clips, and analytical reports.

The pieces can be cross-linked based on context and reader entry points, until the story package resembles a chemistry molecule, as Prof. Linda Crider demonstrated with a model of a web site story made by her students at Miami University in Ohio.

Today's storytelling requires "figuring out how to juxtapose things so they make sense to each other," said Janet Murray, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology senior research scientist and author of Hamlet on the Holodeck. She talked about information as kaleidoscopic instead of mosaic (navigable, not fixed links) and described the informant's task as presenting "the patterns we need to see; show them to us and show us how to control them."

Just the existence of digital archives can alter how daily stories are written, Murray noted, because retrieval delivers stories as chapters of history instead of isolated snapshots of events. The writer or editor now must plan today's story with an awareness that someone can look back at what's happened -- and has been written -- before.

Live and in video
Rapidly, the talk about new dimensions in storytelling morphed into buzz about new dimensions in business relationships, thanks to a disembodied Todd Rundgren, who appeared via video hookup from San Francisco.

Describing PatroNet, his web-centered music distribution service, the rock star and tech roller sounded more like a marketing executive than the composer of "I don't wanna work, just wanna bang on the drums all day."

He's forging an income source for artists with loyal followings but too little sales volume to satisfy record labels. Instead of buying a finished album promoted and distributed through retailers, fans would "pay per next play," through subscriptions toward future music, video clips and personal news from their artists. Bypassing several layers of marketing and distribution middlemen, PatroNet subscription fulfillment slices expenses and tightens intimacy between creator and audience.

Rundgren said, "The product is a relationship rather than a deliverable," with the World-Wide Web site (http://www.wakingdreams.com or http://www.tr-i.com) as the meeting place where fans find live chat, streaming audio and video clips, e-mail exchanges and downloadable previews of works in progress. This encourages subscribers to stay tuned for delivery of CDs, videos and "audio magazines" for annual fees in the $25 to $60 range.

Rundgren said he plans to "utilize the Web as a marketing tool for conventional delivery. The web site is a marketing element, not a delivery vehicle."

Instead of hewing to a recurring release-and-promotion schedule, the PatroNet-funded musician can deliver tunes as they are born. "If an artist can get into that position, where you don't have to negotiate record contracts [frequently] ... you'll spend more time making music, less time promoting it."

His suggestions to newspapers: Decide whom you want to reach, articulate how you want them to interact with you, "pre-fly the experience," then define the technology to deliver the experience and contents to fill the pipe. Partner with technology creators and "still maintain an editorial grip."

"Clearly articulate the level of interaction that you will deliver," he said, then create a brand that gives a predictable quality product. "That's what an editor is supposed to do ... the editor is to set the standards that meet the expectations of the audience," Rundgren said.

An action plan from abstractions
The closing roundtables were intended to convert good thinking into concrete recommendations for industry and API action. Among dozens of ideas that clicked are seminars on evolution in storytelling, anticipating media market changes, building communities and trying new business models.

With a reputation as a stodgy, gray-suit training ground, API is shopping for a new wardrobe of offerings. Launching the Media Center is just one way to put new media treads under the management threads.

In the past 14 months, API also has launched the Extended Learning Center, with hundreds of participants taking courses on-line, and in the next year it will launch an experimental publication and develop a new media course track, Feola said. "That's the kind of stuff we're doing. It's not old gray-suit thinking."

As a kick-off event, Feola said the Founder's Conference would be a success if each attendee left with one new idea. And Feola? "I guess the biggest thing I learned is ... how much outreach is needed to parts of the industry that aren't wired that need to (recognize) it's a good thing."

The question is, change -- how soon and at what price? Got an opinion? Shoot it into the "Lend us your brain" section of the Media Center's web site, http://www.mediacenter.org/. There, the convergence of opinions may be the spark that ignites your Thinking.

-- Marion J. Love

"The people are defining what they choose to be journalism. They are creating their own and what we say may or may or may not be economically viable. ... We simply don't know. We are still floundering and will be for another decade."
-- J.T. "Tom" Johnson, St. Louis Post-Dispatch

"Chat caters to the belligerent drunk at a pop concert."
-- Joshua Quittner, Netly News

From THE COLE PAPERS, December 1997, Copyright © 1997, All Rights Reserved.