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Panel 2: Excellence in the New Media

John McChesney, National Public Radio (moderator)
Kevin McKenna, New York Times/Knight Fellowship Program
Gary Kamiya, Salon
Kim Alexander, California Voter Foundation
Jai Singh, CNET
Pamela Pfiffner, ZDTV.com
Spencer Ante, new media journalist, formerly with Web Magazine

John McChesney: I'm John McChesney. I'm technology correspondent for National Public Radio, and I'm supposed to be moderating this panel. I most recently spent about three months covering the non-trial of Ted Kaczynski. There are times when I get a little weary of the technophilia of the people I cover, so I wanted to cover one of America's most serious technophobes for awhile. It was very interesting.

The title of this panel is Excellence In New Media. I know that a couple of years ago most of my colleagues at NPR would have said that's a contradiction in terms. They were fairly contemptuous of what was going on on the Web.

Our six panelists today have been asked to describe what they view as examples of excellence in journalism at their own Web sites. This is sort of a blow your own horn panel and we will let them do that for five minutes. And they've been asked to talk about who else is doing a good job and also about what journalists need to do to take full advantage of the new medium. That's a big mouthful and quite an undertaking.

One of the things I wanted to do, since this is a blow your own horn panel, is just briefly remind you that NPR does have Web site. It's up there now. You can now go in and listen to radio on demand, one day late. We have a peculiar system at National Public Ratio, member stations who would be a little jealous if the programs went up in real time and vaulted over the local broadcast outlets. So you do have to wait awhile, but it's searchable, and you can go in and look at all of the stories for Morning Edition, the weekend programs, and All Things Considered.

I want to start with Kevin McKenna who is out here taking a vacation at Stanford as a Knight Fellow. Kevin served as the editorial director of the New York Times Electronic Media Company and was, as I understand it, founding editor of New York Times on the Web.

The Times came rather late to this effort, but when they did they came on very strong, and I think most people now recognize that they have one of the strongest... should I call it re-purposing of material on the Web? We can talk a little bit about that.

I visited the Web site yesterday. I visit it fairly regularly, but I went in yesterday and I saw on there that this headline, "Web Site Honors Earth Day and Dishes Dirty on Polluters". I thought wow, the New York Times is the gray lady on-line, it's getting pretty sassy. But it turned out, unfortunately it was just a headline on somebody else's Web site. (Laughter)

So Kevin, I'm going to let you start, and make your five minute pitch.

Kevin McKenna: Thanks, John. I think that's what's known as a left-handed compliment win you say we're one of the strongest sources of re-purposing. I'll get try to reposition us in the course of my five minutes.

What I really want to talk about is not so much blowing my horn or anyone else's, but just from my own experience what some of the challenges were that we faced in the mission of producing excellence on the Web.

When I got into this the beginning of 1995 as one of two journalists from the Times newsroom who was asked to sort of sketch the future of what we might be doing electronically, my colleague and I decided early on that one of the things we had to do was provide original content, because at that point about the worst, and I think now the worst epithet you could hurl at someone was that what they were doing was shovelware. That they were re-purposing what was in print, that they didn't understand that it was a new medium.

So we approached the editor of the Times and we said to him that we wanted to be doing some reporting for the Web site that did not originate in the printed paper. We thought this was going to be the beginning of a long struggle. To our surprise, his immediate response was fine, as long as it's up to New York Times quality -- to which he added, and of course you'll be doing news updates, too, which we thought was going to be round two. We went away and sort of thought to ourselves afterwards, gee, that was easy. Then we woke up the next day and realized that it wasn't easy at all.

As David Talbot said earlier today, the sheer cost of building an editorial infrastructure and a reportorial staff to do original journalism on the Web despite the other economies of the Web is no small feat.

The way we wound up executing this essentially fell into three areas. One was that in what was sort of a conceptual zoning of the paper for our readers on the Web we thought we needed to provide some depth and perhaps slightly savvier coverage of the world of technology itself. So on a daily basis we set out to supplement what was in the paper by doing original reporting on technology in a section that we called Cyber Times, meant to sort of compensate for the ebb and flow of that coverage in the daily paper.

We discovered very quickly that there was more ebb than flow and we were soon doing on average of about two dozen original articles a week for the Web site. But again, doing this without recourse to the real resources of the New York Times, doing it with freelance reporters and a very busy editor of Cyber Times. We've since found that obviously that wasn't sufficient and we've increased those resources.

The second thing we were doing was news updates, as I mentioned, but again, essentially trying to take news from other sources -- the wires and so forth -- who were in a business we were not, providing round the clock news, and trying to add some of our news judgment to it.

Third, we were doing special projects. Some of them independent of the paper, including a presentation on war and peace in Bosnia, a collaboration with NPR and some other partners on the 1996 election. We've done some things in conjunction with the paper including some special issues of the Times magazine, Olympics coverage, special issue on women's health, to which we could bring additional resources and additional multimedia components. And we've done what I would characterize as sort of re-conceptions of print. Most prominently I think in the book section that Adam referred to in the first panel which has been to take the huge assets we have in that category and deconstruct them and put them back together in a form that we think is more suited to the Web.

Of all of these, I think the one that, certainly the one I was closest to and because it happened so early on and involved so much energy and stomach lining, the Bosnia project was one that I think we hoped would sort of set a benchmark of what we wanted to be doing with originality on-line. It was a project that involved a very extensive multimedia photo essay by the photojournalist Gilles Perez, some of whose work is no display here at the journalism school. It involved a very ambitious forum to provide interactivity into which we could hopefully draw a discussion of the issues around the war in Bosnia and the peace settlement, and some depth of coverage as well.

I think in all those ways it has been, the irony of all of this is that in submitting that as we did for a Pulitzer, hoping it would show originality, the Pulitzer Board has now made provision for Internet and interactive entries, but only as a component of a print project.

I think the biggest challenge we have is for those of us who are rooted in other media like print, to be able to get out from being the tail wagging the dog and to commit some greater resources to original enterprise on the Web.

John McChesney: I want to turn now to Gary Kamiya who is the Executive Editor of Salon, which has no print predecessor, no legacy software there. It's one of my favorite Web sites. I think it's quite sassy and elegantly presented, and a fine antidote to Matt Drudge.

The site recently attracted I think considerable national attention in a series of reports by Jonathan Broder and Murray Waas on Ken Starr and David Hale, the witness in the White Water case that supposedly was paid by Richard Mellon Scaife, and you got quite a bit of attention from that.

I wonder just out of the chute, whether you could tell us how much additional traffic the site got as soon as that story broke, and whether or not the Web itself was a source of information about the story or whether that was driven primarily by old media who were advertising and covering your story.

Gary Kamiya: The traffic buildup no that, what would you say David, about 20 percent maybe? It was a significant increase in traffic. This was something that although we had done before in Salon, investigative reporting, never on that scale. It was really a new departure for us. National impact investigative reporting.

Really, in many ways, a first for the Web. I'm not aware of stories of this magnitude that had been broken by on-line publications, so certainly in terms of the credibility of the medium breaking stories of this nature is huge, and it's been huge for us. It's gotten us massive mainstream media attention.

We didn't start out aiming at that. I think we're going to continue going in this direction. Salon has been a constant series of evolutions, not all of which are planned, and that's one of the joys of working in this medium. In some ways our most notable achievement so far has been to survive, to come over from the core editorial group, coming over from the San Francisco Examiner on this harebrained idea that you can run 8,000 word essays and not follow the conventional wisdom of how you survive putting content on-line. We had huge major internal debates about that, and they to some degree still go on as to whether we can get away with the kind of stuff we're doing. And the fact that we're still standing, in many ways, and still kicking, and still offering a significantly different amount of heterogeneity to the mainstream media is, I think, something we're really proud of and we're going to keep pushing that.

I think that on of the things that the mainstream media tends to have is an institutional... It's a certain type of mindset in which like television there is a creeping degree of attempt to speak with a somewhat omniscient and somewhat every man, a reasonable man's position. That is not something to be thrown out lightly, and I'm not somebody that trashes objectivity, actually. I think we do that at our peril. But I think that it also becomes rather gray. It's difficult for mainstream media to be as sassy and heterogeneous and mixed up and have as much voice as Salon does.

If you look at newspapers, and I'm not saying that should be their role. I don't know that the New York Times should be the New York Observer, which is a publication that Salon is much closer to with sort of a hornet's nest of squabbling columnists, of irresponsible, hopefully not libelously so opinions, beautifully written literary essays, hard reporting, a real wild grab bag of a lot of different things. I don't know that we should be demanding of institutions like the Times or the Wall Street Journal, that they be like that. But I do think that that's something that is a real void in American cultural life now. That there isn't enough of that. There tends to be a homogenized quality, and one of the things that the new media can do is fill that void.

I'm not completely saying, as some of the speakers on the earlier panel, about just, I sensed a feeling that pure anarchy of mass, new media communication is a good thing because it creates a sense that sooner or later all intermediation will be removed and the people will decide. Well, I think mediation's always going to be there because putting news together is expensive, and it's an elite process in some ways. There's got to be some kind of markers here. However, those markers can be I think pushed, and can be played with as long as fundamental journalistic truths are respected.

So what we're trying to do at all times at Salon is preserve those old journalistic verities which from my point of view as Executive Editor, there's no difference working in new media from old media. It's the same old stuff. You get stories that come in, you edit them. Are they good, are they bad? There isn't some kind of magical penumbra of the world is out there waiting for us and we're so democratic that we're connected. That doesn't affect your editorial judgments day to day as new media editor. So there's a certain amount of sort of mystification at the theoretical level of this.

When you're actually operating content of the new media, it's not any different from operating in content in the old media, with the exception, and maybe this could change, that partly because we're not institutionally beholden, we can be really irreverent and really free swinging, and that is, I think that's a good thing. That's something that in the media landscape, the danger is you tip over into sensationalism, which is one of the undercurrents of fear in this discussion, which is dominating all media. But I think there's a way where you can have a tabloid mentality that is also intelligent. To some degree that's what we do, so...

John McChesney: Our next presenter is somewhat unusual on the panel because she is not a publication that does the kinds of things the rest of the journalists do. She's the President of the California Voter Foundation, Kim Alexander. I'm told that she was selected, (Susan) Rasky told me this last night, that she was selected partly because she's doing what traditional media no longer does, and that is gathering voter education information, putting it on the Web.

In 1996 and 1997, Kim and CVF as it's called, received the James Madison Freedom of Information Award from the Society of Professional Journalists here in Northern California. And she developed the first real-time, on-line campaign finance database called Digital Sunlight.

Kim Alexander: It's a pleasure to be here. This is a really worthwhile conference to be having at this time.

I want to tell you first a little bit about the California Voter Foundation. It's an organization I started four years ago. Our mission is to provide the public with timely, convenient and free access to the information that we need to participate in public life in a meaningful way. We focus on three areas, specifically improving voter information and voter education, improving public access to important records like campaign finance data, and working with the news media to improve political coverage.

The California Voter Foundation's work is based on a couple of premises that I wanted to share with you. The first and foremost is that people are busy. If there's anything you remember from what I say today, please keep this in mind as journalists. People are busy. We are always hearing that the reason why people aren't voting is because they say they're too busy. A lot of us scoff at that and say how can you be too busy to vote? But anyone who is a California voter, as many of us are in this room, knows that voting in this state is very complicated. There are a lot of difficult and complex measures on the ballot. We elect everybody. We have nine independently elected statewide officers. Most people can't tell you what the State Controller does what the Secretary of State does, what the Insurance Commissioner does. They can't tell you who their Assemblyman is. There's a reason for that. It's not because they don't care, it's because they're busy.

Another assumption of our work is what I like to call the five percent factor. It would be great if everybody was involved and were engaged but I don't think that's going to happen. Fortunately, for democracy to work to the best of its ability we don't need everybody to be involved. We need maybe five or ten percent of the people at any given time to be paying attention to what our politicians are doing. The public relies greatly on the news media to help them do that job.

Another factor that underlies a lot of our work is my application of the Heisenberg Theory of Science which says something like a watched object will change its behavior just because it's being watched. It's true in science and it's true in politics as well. If we can get five or ten percent of the public to be paying attention to politicians at any given time, guess what? They will perform better. This is the truth. I've seen it happen time and time again.

The accomplishment for CVF that I'm most proud of, I think the first and foremost that I've been thinking a lot about as we approach the '98 election season is consistency. My organization has been publishing information on the Internet for California voters since the November 1994 election. Because we've been doing it for so long, people are finally getting used to the idea that hey, you can go on the Internet and find this information.

As John mentioned, we also produced the first real time campaign finance database. We did that for 1995 in San Francisco with the help of Digital Equipment Corporation and the San Francisco Registrar of Voters. San Francisco was the first jurisdiction in the country to mandate electronic filing of campaign finance data. With that data coming in in a digital format, it was only a couple of hours that it took to convert it, put it into a database, upload it onto the Internet where it resides today, and anyone can go on-line and search that data and find out in two seconds just about anything you want to know about campaign financing in the San Francisco mayoral election.

Another project that I'm proud of is our late contribution watch project from the 1996 election. I know many people here in this room probably subscribe to that service. We wanted to do something with campaign finance data for the state elections in 1996, and I knew from past experience that all these late contributions of $1,000 or more get disclosed with the Secretary of State in the final two weeks, but they stack up into these huge binders that nobody can ever go and look at. So what we did was we sent a team of researchers to the Secretary of State's office every day with laptops, and they data entered those records onto the laptops, brought them back to our office, we uploaded them every day to our Web sit and e-mailed them out to everybody on our news list called CVF News. For the first time reporters all over the state, even if they weren't in Sacramento, even if they didn't have the time to plow through those records, they were able to get access to this information and incorporate it into their news coverage. In doing so, they had better news coverage. There are better stores from that.

Another thing that I'm really happy about for this 1998 election is that we have now an archive of past election information. So, for example, in 1994 we collected platform papers and other documents from 32 people who ran for statewide offices, including many people who are now running for reelection or running for new offices. So for the first time ever voters and journalists will be able to come into our Web site let's say you want to see if Dan Lungren, for example, kept his promises that he made as Attorney General in 1994 as a candidate. Well those promises are on our Web site and you can go and look at that and actually evaluate as a voter or as a journalist whether or not he's kept is promises, and other candidates as well.

So what we're doing is using this technology to create a pubic record. In creating this public record, we are improving accountability in politics tremendously. And no, not everybody cares about this, but enough people do, and I know because thousands of them come to our Web site, that it's going to make a difference.

Finally, I think another really important accomplishment for CVF a lot of you are aware of is the passage of Senate Bill 49 last year, which mandated electronic filing for the State of California. That's now the law. California has the strongest electronic filing and Internet disclosure law in the country. It's being implemented this year. And it happened largely because of this application of this Heisenberg Theory. We tracked, I tracked the issue all throughout the year, notifying everybody constantly of what was going on. And because of that, journalists covered the issue, the public was aware of what was going on, politicians felt they needed to be responsive to that. They passed the bill and we now have this great law.

With that I'll conclude, and thank you.

John McChesney: I just have one quick question. Do you have any sense of whether the primary users of the site are the reporters, or...

Kim Alexander: Yes. We have a lot of journalists who come to our site. In fact we really designed the site with journalists in mind because we think of our job as sort of informing the informers. Not everybody has access to the Internet, but enough people do and are motivated to get that access that if journalists use our site, for example, to quickly find a candidate's phone number or their Web site address or be able to save that time and spend more time reporting and less time just tracking down a phone number.

John McChesney: Our next presenter is Jai Singh. Jai is responsible, I'm told, for all the news gathering at CNET which is a very successful site, and the endless pursuit of information about the information age. I sometimes wonder, the limits of appetite that we have for this sort of stuff, but CNET does a good job and I use it constantly as a journalist.

Jai recently got an award that all of us would lust for -- Marketing Computers Magazine named him the Most Influential Online Journalist, which is quite a title. Jai?

Jai Singh: Thanks. Since we are a new media organization, just by show of hands, how many people actually know of CNET or use it? Wow! ...all those eyeballs and click-throughs. (Laughter)

Just a brief summary of what CNET is for those of you who don't know us, CNET is the computer network, which means we have a network of sites, about nine in all on the Web, and we have four TV shows to complement that. Three of them are aired on cable channels, USA, and SciFi, one called TV.COM whose claim to fame is that Ron Reagan Jr. is one of the co-hosts. It is a nationally syndicated TV show.

I head up one of the network sites called NEWS.COM. Since I know most about that I will briefly tell you and address this issue of excellence in new media. We launched in September of 1996. By the way, our mission is to provide technology news. We launched in September of 1996 and one of the first e-mails that I got, since this is an interactive media and you hear back from readers instantaneously, was to do with a story we had done on ATM which is a networking technology. The reader's comment was, "Don't blow your techno-weenie credentials the first day." He was referring to the fact that we probably didn't know asynchronous transfer mode, which is the networking equal on ATM from automated teller machines, the other ATM. Never mind the fact that the reporter who actually wrote the story had been covering the industry for over two years and actually did know what ATM really meant, but never mind that fact. The point was we didn't have any print or broadcast parentage, we'd come out of the chute so to speak out of nowhere, and how could we actually be doing credible journalism on the Web?

That kind of was followed by a scathing piece in the LA Times several weeks later where the thrust of the article was that in our zeal to publish first we in the new media or on-line media, just publish without verifying and fact checking our stories. What was disconcerting to me was the fact that I had a conversation with the reporter for about half an hour, and I kept emphasizing the fact that nobody on my team and nobody in my department has been given the marching orders that since we have the means to publish instantaneously, just go ahead and publish, fact checking be damned. The story appeared in the LA Times quite the contrary, basically, again, taking into issue the fact that here was a bunch of yahoos who just somehow landed from Mars without any proper credentials, didn't do credible journalism. When I called the editor of record on that story, tried to explain to him what had actually transpired, he stood by the story, he said, and then he hung up on me. I suppose that is how new media was supposed to be treated at that point.

Fortunately, Jonathan Weber who was on the earlier panel was the technology editor, came back from vacation. I talked to him, and the LA Times ran a correction on the story.

Then to top it all off, the most trusted man in media, Walter Cronkite, laid in on us in the new media back in the fall of 1996 in an interview with the San Francisco Chronicle. Walter said something to the effect that anybody on the Web can be a publisher, take into the days of the broadsheet publishing where anybody who had access to a printing press could publish whatever the heck they wanted to publish. And even more so, he went on to say that only people who could do credible journalism on the Web would be the mainstream media, obviously in his cases meaning CBS News and ABC News, I suppose, and probably the New York Times.

I'm here to report that it's just not the way it is, basically. As you all know, his sign-off was, "That's the way it is," but I'm here to tell you that's not the way it is. (Laughter) The fact is that ABC News online just cut a deal with us and they're carrying our technology news on their site. We just cut a deal with Bloomberg, and I'm most happy to report that the New York Times, who had not credited us for a single story in the year and a half of our existence, has given credit to us over the last two weeks -- two weeks in a row, I should say -- for a story on Microsoft - DOJ. I suppose the find us credible now. So that's great to know.

I'll just close out by saying that I'm also pleased that our peers in the media, at least in the new media and old media, are taking into account the good job we have done. We won three awards just this past year, which is basically three months including the Webby and a mouthful...which is basically we got the award for being the best news site for a non-newspaper site. (Laughter)

John McChesney: Our next presenter is Pamela Pfiffner. Pamela is the executive producer of ZDTV.COM which is the on-line companion to Ziff Davis' new cable channel. Ziff seems to be betting that our appetite for information about information devices and information industry is just insatiable. They're going to be producing six to eight hours of fresh material every day on the information industry and culture, which is pretty awesome.

Pamela Pfiffner: I made the mistake of stopping by the office this morning on my way here, so...

Ziff Davis, as some of you may or may not know, is a traditional publisher, been around for more than 50 years. Started out doing special interest magazines such as Modern Bride and Car and Driver and so on. And in the '80s, sold those entire publications and decided to throw in his lot with this new computer stuff. So the company has been focused primarily on technology and computers for quite a long time now. I think it was actually earlier than the 1980s.

But recently, we've decided to, I suppose it's a little bit self-reflective, but to start a cable channel devoted to computers, technology, and the Internet. The job that I have is to integrate the Internet in with all of that television programming. So that when we talk about new media in this particular instance, we're talking about broadcast television and the Internet and how those two cross over.

A lot of people have talked for awhile about how the Internet is probably more like television than it is like print, and I would agree with that to some extent in that what... I recently was editor-in-chief of a print magazine, and some of the similarities are very much there in that content is content, stupid; good editing, good reporting, good fact checking, good research, all of that enters into it. You have to have that... That should be a given.

However, when you get into new media you have to, I think, think a lot more about technology than you used to. I think the print heritage has been very much that there were reporters and there were ink-stained wretches in the back room who magically transformed all your wonderful prose into this thing that you could hold. In my experience, it's not that every reporter out there needs to know how to code a page in HTML. I would never say that. However, you just have to be thinking a lot more about the presentation than you ever have been before.

It's very easy to try to translate one to the other with mixed results. I'm currently in the situation where suddenly everyone is saying well we'll just do streaming video, right? We have this television stuff, we'll just put up a little window and bam, bing, bam, boom, we'll be watching TV on the Internet.

Well, it's not that easy. In fact if you go out and look at a lot of research, watching video on the Internet, there's maybe about 10 percent of people who actually watch video on the Internet because it's the technology. Because if you've got a slow modem, etc., etc., you get a very bad experience.

So it's one of the things that I wrestle with a lot, which is how to use these tools to their best advantage and how you can really maximize the content that you do have and make it accessible and entertaining and all those other good things.

Having said that, I love Slate, and I love Salon both. I like going there and reading these long stories. However, people don't spend, in my experience, a lot of time on a single page. They click around a lot. So while I love going to MSNBC and looking at the news content that they have, I get bored if it takes me a long time to open their page. I don't know if anybody else has had that experience, but it's a beautifully, wonderfully rich graphic page, but it's a pain in the butt, and I end up sort of clicking away and going away from it.

So I'm sort of taking a slightly different tack here than the normal excellence in journalism. But I think that as we move forward we really have to keep in mind what the user and viewer experience is. One of the earlier sessions was talking a little bit about democracy and so on. We don't -- not everyone out there is blessed with the kind of line that I have at my office that gives me access to Web pages very quickly. So you always have to be thinking about that kind of stuff and you always have to be thinking about how to write short, I think, write short headlines that captures the eye. We can probably debate this for awhile later, but that's sort of my spiel this morning. As I'm thinking about the fact that we're launching in two weeks, and I have a new Web site that goes up in two weeks. My head is rather consumed with that right now.

John McChesney: I just will throw in a personal observation here that I've said before to Spencer Ante who's our next speaker, that it seems to me that reporters for this new medium, good reporters, are probably going to pay no more attention to how their pieces are presented than reporters today pay attention to how the front page of a newspaper is composed. They might be concerned about their positioning in there, but I don't think that's the reporter's worry. I don't think the reporter needs to be concerned about how that story is put on the Web. I think that what Salon has been doing indicates that.

Spencer is an editor, has been an editor at Web Magazine. He's a writer who contributes to Wired and to the New York Times. Most pertinent right now I think is that he is an editorial consultant to the Webby Awards where he's developing a process, I'm told, to nominate and judge the most innovative and creative Web sites. So I presume there is a Webby for Excellence in Journalism. I'm curious, it's been done now for two years and I'm ashamed to admit I don't know who won that award for the last two year and I don't know on what standard it was given.

Spencer Ante: Actually, we're surrounded by winners of the Webby Awards on this panel. Salon has won the Webby Award two years in a row. Kim Alexander was nominated for a Webby Award in the politics/law category in 1997. And NEWS.COM was the winner of a Webby Award in the news category. So...

Voice: I might point out against the mainstream likes of ABC News, MSNBC, and Wired. And the New York Times.

Spencer Ante: Actually, I just wanted to pick up on a few points that Pam was making. I feel that there's been a lot of talk about the Web. You say the words new media and everyone sort of automatically thinks about the Web. But I think the Web is for all its greatness, for all the amazing things it's doing for us, it's still overrated to a large degree. I think e-mail is actually the underrated medium of now, of the present. I just wanted to talk about that for a few minutes and give you a couple of examples of why I think that.

As a publishing platform, the Web has gotten very expensive in the last few years. When people were building Web sites in '95 and '96 it was pretty cheap, self-publishers could come on, create a brand identity relatively quickly. Then you had the commercialization of the Web that's been going on over the last few years, and it's really raised the bar of production, of Java applets, you have database integration, you have all these things that cost a lot of money to create.

The other thing about the Web is that the costs of distribution are pretty high, too, because when you have hosting services and your Web site is getting a lot of traffic, you have to pay for that. With e-mail, the cost of distribution is essentially free because all the servers that are transmitting your messages are picking up that cost.

The other thing about the Web that's kind of annoying to a lot of people is that there's a lot of hype around it. Like Pam was saying, the pages take a long time to download. It's platform-dependent. One of the pressing problems of many Web developers today is creating content that will disseminate itself in the same way in every platform, which is virtually impossible to do. You don't have that problem with e-mail.

Three examples of excellence in newsletter or e-mail journalism, I would say, are, it's funny that we talk about the Drudge Report. The Drudge Report has a Web site, but it's actually the newsletter that's really the main interface for the Drudge Report, and most people I know don't even read the Drudge Report Web site, they just get the e-mail, they open it up, and they're like oh, the Titanic just made $50 million last weekend.

Another example I would raise is the fight-censorship mailing lists which were started by Declan McCullagh a couple of years go when he was an undergraduate at Carnegie Mellon. The administration at Carnegie Mellon was trying to censor, I think it was a newspaper, I believe, and he started this mailing list around, a discussion of should the university be allowed to sensor this content? It grew into this really robust mailing list with 5,000 or 6,000 readers.

One of the things it has accomplished in the last two years is this whole debate about blocking software that happened last year. All the controversy over the Communications Decency Act. They single-handedly changed the discourse around blocking software, and by revealing that a lot of these technologies were actually censoring a lot of content in Web sites like, at Web sites that had information about AIDS or breast cancer, very valuable information that was being censored unknowingly by the people who were using these technologies. That story was disseminated through e-mail.

The last example I would raise for a more mainstream example of sort of corporate publishing is PC World Online, which is distributing like 2.5 million e-mails a day right now. That's like a viable revenue stream. They're getting five to seven cents per impression on that e-mail list, and it's actually growing at a quicker rate than the Web. The e-mail publishing is growing at a rate of 10 percent a month whereas the Web page fees are only growing at a rate of four percent a month.

So I would say the Web is great, but let's not underestimate the power of e-mail to really change the way that people think and to shape the debate.

The other thing I would like to come back to is just this whole issue of credibility. I think it's a smokescreen. I think it's largely the reactions of a threatened old media who feel that their power and their authority is being undermined, and it is. And the real problem is not new media credibility. Is Jerry Springer credible? Is the World Weekly News credible? Is Rush Limbaugh credible? I don't know.

John McChesney: As somebody was saying last night, we had Walter Winchell, we've had plenty of predecessors to...

Spencer Ante: There's a long tradition of tabloidism in the media. It's always been there, it will always be there. There will always be tabloidism in any communications, just like there will always be excellence in any form of media. So to demonize the new media as a threat to journalistic integrity seems to be beside the point for me.

I'll just come back to the Webby Awards thing, just to finish up, because I do think there is a need for basically creating a fire which we all can rally around as a community of on-line content developers or journalists. There's a need for that. There's a need to get together and celebrate what we think is the best of the medium. I think that's why the Webby Awards have taken off, to a large extent.

So in absence of the Web Magazine, which is a magazine I used to work at and be an editor, which gave birth to the Webby Awards, so it's no longer there. So what we want to do is establish an academy. What we've done this week is we trademarked and established the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences. That's going to be an independent, non-commercial body that's going to fulfill the functions of editorial review and editorial judging for the Webby Awards moving forward in the future. It's still underwritten by IDG, and it's being run out of their conference division right now.

In some ways it's better that it's not affiliated with a magazine, because a lot of the criticism we got was that it was tied to a product. It's a legitimate criticism, but now that that's no longer a problem, we're hoping that we can keep building the sort of future... We're really laying a foundation for the future we feel to reward and honor the best and the brightest in digital arts and sciences. Because who knows? The Web might not be here five years from now.

John McChesney: What I want to do now is immediately go to the floor for questions, rather than confining things up here.

Question: As you were picking the panel and as you look at these sites that you've got here, can you categorize the values or the qualities that you think constitute an excellent (inaudible)...

John McChesney: I didn't pick the panel, so you're going to have to address that question I think to Susan Rasky who had a hand in choosing it.

Question: Let me just ask the panelists what the categories or values are that they would say constitute an excellent journalistic Web site.

Jai Singh: If I could, the earlier discussions sort of revolved around if it is new media you sort of have to have different standards, ethical standards for journalism.

In my group, what I have decided is that I'm not looking for somebody who has multimedia savvy or HTML savvy, somebody who has the basic understanding of what reporting and editing is all about. If they are recent graduates then they at least should be well versed in what journalism is, and obviously we have a mix of people who have a dozen plus years of journalism experience at the LA Times or the Chronicle, what have you.

So what we have gone out, and actually we have written our ethical guidelines and policies on the do's and don'ts of journalism. I'm just treating this as another medium. It is not new media, therefore run roughshod over the ethics.

Voice: What we hear from our visitors to our site that they like the most is the fact that despite the fact that we present them with a massive amount of information, I craft our sites in a way that makes it very easy for people to navigate their way through them because going back to that time issue, anyone who surfs the Web knows how frustrating it is to be clicking around on a site, trying to find what you're looking for, you can't find it, you've got to wait for all these damn graphics to load in, and it's just maddening. We're on the Web to try to save time not waste time, most of us, which I think is a big myth out there. People think we're just all surfing and we're these junkies. Most people are using the Internet to find specific information that they need for travel or about the weather or about traffic or whatever it is that they need, and they want it fast. So the challenge is to try to present that information to them in a way that's easier for them to find. So you've got to put yourself in the user's seat, as another speaker mentioned.

Also, I would always recommend keeping your graphics light, make sure they load in very fast. People are looking for information in news organizations less than I think art and things like that, although you need art and icons to help people identify your site.

Two other things I would mention that are really critical is to put your contact information right up front on your home page because a lot of people are just going to your site to find your phone number. They may not even be looking for the content. The other thing is to respect the fact that we want Internet users to look at every Web site with scrutiny, so you need to respect that and make it very clear who's sponsoring your site, who's paying for it, where your money's coming from. All of that will help you shape a very excellent site.

Question: My name is Fernando Quintero, and I'm director of the News Watch Project, and our Web address is newswatch.sfsu.edu (for San Francisco State University).

I didn't want to pose a question so much as make a statement or observation about this discussion. That is where does fair, accurate, credible coverage of people of color and gays and lesbians fit into excellence in the new media? And if we're taking a critical look at new media, shouldn't we also be taking a critical look at coverage of these communities in news content as well as personnel?

Spencer Ante: I agree with you. I think that's a really important issue, especially given the democratic underpinnings of the Internet. I think it's really important for all journalists and the media establishment or the media industry in general to make that a goal in their jobs.

But I would have to say that although there is a lot of activity going on, Channel A is a really good example, and I know Steven Chin is here and he's going to talk to you later about the unfortunate circumstances in their Web site. They recently have gone through a big change where their whole content operation was gutted and that's a problem. Why did that happen? What's going to happen to that Web site? This is the most well known Asian-centric Web site around, and it's going through some hard times. Hopefully Steven will comment about that later.

Voice: I think one of the good things is that much as someone was saying in the earlier panel just about the fact that anyone can publish a zine now using computers, I think there's so many great things you can do on the Web now that help serve a lot of communities that don't normally get served.

One of the things that we've found in some studies is that nearly 50 percent of all people who cruise the Web are women, and yet there's not always a lot of great emphasis just towards servicing that community. But recently I've been finding a lot more sites that are addressing particular needs of working women, for example. There's BabyCenter.Com. Salon has the Mothers Who Think column within that. There's just... But it does provide an opportunity for a lot more people to get up there and express their views and be out there, without a great deal of expense. So that is one of the great I think equalizing factors of it.

As far as how the New York Times or what covers those kinds of things, I can't comment.

Voice: I would just say that I think that it's true that there's certainly much more diversity of viewpoints and much more access to it on the Web. I think one of the things that's unfortunate is whether it's some of the areas you were describing or other areas of public interest, that so much of our energies so far at this stage in on-line journalism have gone into essentially covering the world of technology. And especially among the general interest publications, there's a disproportionate amount of journalistic enterprise that's gone into that. Some of it very good. CNET has done great stuff. But it would be nice to see some of that energy, particularly among organizations that have the resources, to spread it more widely, to see that applied to other areas as well.

Gary Kamiya: I'd like to say that we were very aware of those editorial issues and we try to have a wide ranging editorial look at many issues of that nature, but there's a whole area of our Web site and other Web sites also we haven't talked about here which is a really good forum for exploration of this insofar as this is partaken in by people of color, which as we all know from the recent study, are still disproportionately low on-line, which is our discussion center, Table Talk, which has no editorial control, which is people talking about this. And racial issues in particular are very popular. There's a lot of thrashing out going on there, and it's really a microcosm in its own way of what President Clinton has been trying to do with his national conversation. I daresay it's a bit more candid and gloves off -- for good and ill.

So I think that's a very valuable function that Web sites can serve in this regard. But I would also like to say something that's a little subversive and unpleasant that no one has talked about yet in terms of this subject. A gentleman asked about coverage of these issues -- not just people of color and gays, but just poorer people, the voices of those who are shut out of mainstream media discussion. I don't think anyone yet has brought up the fact that one of the double-edged swords of running a Web site is you know who's reading your stores. When you're trying to survive and you're trying to garner page views, so far to no one's surprise who knows anything about why foreign bureaus close and various things, when we run, for example stories about foreign affairs, hard news about economic issues, these are not stories that people necessarily rush to read right now. Now that may not be true on every Web site, but I'm just posing this as something that needs to be considered because there's an economic disincentive in some ways on Web sites to go down that road when they're commercially driven and this is a problem. I don't know what the solution to the problem is.

If you want to cover stories, and I'm not saying... We do not not run stories because they're not going to get hits. But also every Web site is trying to survive. So that's an issue.

Voice: Last night when I was talking to John on the phone I actually said to me the most excellent site is the one that survives and makes money, which is kind of an ugly truth, but I definitely agree with that.

Question: Jon Carroll, columnist for a frequently laughable West Bay Daily. (Laughter)

What interests me for both this panel and the previous panel is the dating that's gone on. People have said three years, four years we've been in business. The first excellence in journalism that I can remember was in 1989 right after the earthquake when 400 or more people became journalists and reported to a central location their experience of what was going on, at a time when certain organizations had failed to prepare for an earthquake in San Francisco which seems unusual, but nevertheless happened. Therefore, the presses didn't run. The most reliable source of where the damage was, what was going on, was on-line on the well where I was. So from my point of view what has happened to new media is that it's gotten older as it's gotten older. It has become more hierarchical and less democratic. It's taken less advantage of this fabulous interactivity and the fabulous expertise of the readers.

Gary was talking about Table Talk. I'm wondering what each of you have done to bring your readers into the editorial process and into the discussion.

Kevin McKenna: I speak, in our case at the Times we've had a number of on-line discussions that we've started. I think one of our goals, which we haven't done as well in executing as we'd like is to find a way to integrate that more with content so that people are led from reportage to the opportunity to discuss it and vice versa. It's an important part, we think, of what we're trying to do. It's a very hard thing for established media to do well because they're not used to giving up control. It was something we were very uncomfortable with, to say the least. But we've learned a lot from it. I think we're finding ways to do it better.

It's been interesting, it's certainly been an education to see what kinds of discussions take place under our roof.

John McChesney: One of the things that happened at National Public Radio recently was when the Lewinsky story first broke, and this is not an example of on-screen interactive activity, but when the story first broke and NPR came on with its coverage, which was essentially the same as what other people were doing. Both programs, all things considered in Morning Edition, were inundated with e-mail at a volume they had never seen at National Public Radio before, and it changed the editorial course at NPR. I wasn't privy to the internal discussions, but I could hear what was going on there and I knew about this flood of e-mail that was coming in. It actually had a tremendous impact, and that never would have happened in the days of paper mail. It would have been too slow, and would have dribbled in, and it just wouldn't have happened that way. But this was instantaneous, almost within a day coverage changed.

Jai Singh: I would just like to say that I think even more so than print, we do hear the reader's voice hour in and hour out. They write to us constantly. Does it shape our coverage? To some extent it does.

A great example is the rabid Apple fans. Every time you write a story that says "beleaguered Apple", oh, boy. (Laughter) So you are actually thinking about it the next time you write the story. I would not say that we've been cow-towed into leaving the word beleaguered out, but it does come into your thinking as you're typing the next story.

Spencer Ante: It's one of the most interesting things on the Web, I think. Success stories, is the community sites. Sites like Tripod and sites like GeoCities, and sites like Third Age, which are basically creating communities of interest for senior citizens, for college age, whatever. Any niche you can find, really. These are sites which are actually creating successful business models. What's interesting for this discussion today for journalism is that it completely changes the role of the journalist. Instead of being a "reporter" or writer or editor, you become sort of a facilitator.

The metaphor that I like to use when I organize an on-line discussion with Salon's Table Talk forum, because we didn't have discussion forums on the Web Magazine Web site, so we used Salon's. It's like throwing a party. It's like you've got to invite the right people, get them into the same room and pay attention to them. Tend to them and cultivate them and nurture them. If you don't, they're going to desert you.

That's one of the lessons of new media, I think, is that people have really finely tuned bullshit filters, because we're very media savvy and growing up in a media saturated age you learn to see through the bullshit really quickly. If you don't learn to cultivate your readers and nurture your readers, and I know anyone who's worked on the Web knows it's like you've tapped into a nervous system. You feel them. You know what they're thinking and they're doing and you have to constantly pay attention to that.

Kim Alexander: I'd like to add to this question about getting feedback. It is rally important to get feedback, but I would really caution anyone who's looking at doing anything on the Web, if you go forward with any sort of interactive component you'd better have the staff to do it right. If you don't, it can just be a mess. Every discussion needs a guide, you need to have someone who's helping it along. We haven't done that in our site, but we're planning to do it in 1999. What we do is a number of thing to figure out how can we improve our content for voters after each election. We look at our usage statistics to see what kind of records people are looking at, what documents are people looking at, what are they not looking at? We have a guest book where we have people able to post their comments and we look at those. And we're going to be implementing a membership program later on this year and we will be polling our members with this new program on an annual basis to let them help us decide our content development priorities.

Question: I have a comment and a question I hope will be maybe a little contentious. Mr. McChesney said that you didn't think that journalists needed to really think about how their work would be presented...

John McChesney: Any more than any other medium, I think. Obviously you have to think about how...

Question: ...may be different, but I think a lot of articles on the Web right now remind me a little bit of seeing a fixed camera movie of a play. You're happy that you could see the play, it may have been a play you wouldn't have otherwise seen, and we all love to see a good work however we see it, but one has the feeling that it's not really rising to the potential of the medium.

I think that there's two reasons for that and there's two things that writers can really do to help themselves do that. One is to learn, I think if they do learn the most about the medium they can, they'll be able to work their stories in a way that will take advantage of those things. The more subtle difference that can be made is I think writers like screenwriters have to do, might have to learn to take a little bit of a back seat in terms of... Not a back seat, but to share the spotlight a bit with designers and technical people in terms of seeing their work as a piece, rather than just as a piece of writing on the Web. By doing that, I think you can potentially learn to not only excite your audience and gain a larger audience, but hopefully to excite an audience that maybe is slightly less logocentric than a lot of us in the room here. To bring people in who would not read a 1,000 word article, but who might read those 1,000 words if they're brought to them in bits and pieces in the way that technology can do.

I should say that I think that will change on the Web as the Web becomes more capable of delivering visual stuff. Right now it's still pretty much a text-driven operation. Until that changes it seems to me that writing, good writing and good reporting are essentially the same for the two mediums.

I've gone around on this one before, and it gets to be a pretty hot issue, but magazines like Salon and Slate are doing a very good job with long form articles. I don't think that the Web necessarily means that you begin to adopt a kind of USA Today bullet writing for the screen -- maybe I'm misunderstanding you. At least that's my opinion as long as we're text driven. I'm curious about what you guys think about it.

Voice: I'm not talking about adding gimmicks and a lot of media which, as people mentioned, can be expensive, and I don't want to get into sketching out my own ideas. … I work at ABCNEWS.COM which is just beginning to do this, and I have the sort of unusual title of Information Designer, so maybe I come at this from a different angle than a lot of people do, but that's part of my job is getting the writers there to think, oh, listen, we're doing an interview, or you've interviewed ten people. What if we put their heads on the page and you can click on their heads and see the quotes, etc., etc., maybe in a point/counterpoint, whatever it might be. We're at the beginning of that process. But as I said, it doesn't have to be gimmicky and it doesn't have to b media intensive, but it can be done in a way that uses the medium and creates a new type of stage for the writing.

John McChesney: I'd just add that NPR now puts pictures on its Web sit, thereby violating what was almost a religious article of faith that we never used visual representations. And watch that space. When video becomes available, I'll bet NPR starts sending video down the Web.

Question: My question is very brief. It is for CNET and for the New York Times, and for the others if they have something to say. I would like to know if they have a sense of the proportion of users who accessed their sites from outside the United States and if they think they serve them with excellence.

Kevin McKenna: I can tell you in our case the proportion is much lower than it would have been because for a variety of reasons we chose to apply a subscription model to our users.

Question: Which reasons?

Kevin McKenna: Well, because it was a business decision.

Question: How many foreign subscribers do you have?

Kevin McKenna: I don't have the latest statistics, but it's a very small percentage of our usership, which obviously would have the potential to be much larger if we weren't charging. So to that extent, I think it's unfortunate from an editorial standpoint that we've shortened our reach.

Question: What I don't understand is that people from outside the world are not likely buyers of the print version of the New York Times, so you are cutting yourself from people who cannot take away the readership from your, the circulation from your print version. So I would like you to explain to me what business decision. Explain.

Kevin McKenna: I was hoping that this conference being devoted to journalism would be one where I wouldn't have to put on a business hat. (Laughter) I think the feeling was that as an experimental basis since no one knew what model was ultimately going to prevail, this was one place where it could be tested, because we knew from anecdotal evidence that people would pay $14 in a Hong Kong hotel lobby for a six day old copy of the New York Times. Why not see if they'd pay for something the same day? Which ultimately may not prove to be the ultimate model. I don't know.

Jai Singh: We get a larger percentage, we get almost 15 to 17 percent of our readers from overseas is we don't charge them. We give our content for free. Obviously we are providing a great service, again, just like the New York Times. Many of these readers did not have access to technology news, breaking technology news, or technology news of any kind for that matter. Here they are, they can access it.

It used to be if the technology of print publication got to the European borders or Asian borders then they got to read it. What we hear from them over and over again since 50 percent of technology consumption is overseas, this is great. They can get the latest and greatest happening in the world of technology

So we find our growth has steadily increased. A challenge for us is obviously we don't have the big branding that the New York Times has, and it's by word of mouth that we have gained the eyeballs, if you will, over the course of the last year and a half, two years. So to us it's very pleasing.

Question: My name is Sedge Thomson and I do a radio show called West Coast Live that goes around the world and it's also on the Internet.

I was struck by the vocabulary being used here today by the panelists, I guess on both panels so far this morning I've heard traffic, marketing analysis, distribution, click-through, eyeballs, strategy, brand identity, page views, niche, usership, and so forth. I wonder if this should be the Committee of Concerned Business Executives, and how the financing of the new media is affecting the journalism, in part because so many are both editors and CEOs or co-founders. I wonder how many people who are working at these sites have equity positions? Can we have a show of hands? And how does that affect the relationship? I don't imagine Jon Carroll at the Chronicle has an equity position with the family that owns the paper. (Laughter) I was just wondering if you have any comments about how this has affected your view and your practice as journalists.

Voice: I kind of agree with Louis Rossetto when he said before that the problem of the business model is not specific to new media, it's actually specific to all media. One of the problems... The main threat to good journalism I see right now today in today's society is the increasing centralization and conglomeratizaton of media. This is a trend that's been going on for awhile. Ben Bagdikian used to be dean of this school wrote a very influential book called The Media Monopoly.

So for example you have Disney buying ABC News, and then you have this breakfast cereal executive coming into the LA Times and shutting down Newsday, and the stock price soars. That's a big problem. Where is there, in this pressure to increase shareholder return in these publicly traded companies, where is there room for good journalism? That's the big issue, I think.

Voice: It's in the whole industry. As Spencer is saying, it's not just in on-line stuff. I think what the Internet is doing is providing journalists who really want to practice their craft with an opportunity to return to that craft in a way that you don't have to deal with the business people, you don't have to deal with the marketers.

What I think is going to happen in the future is that journalists who want to cover a story over a long period of time are going to be able to use e-mail, as Spencer is saying, to subscribe people to that story, and I'll be able to pay to support that journalist telling me that story in my mailbox over a long period of time. Then we get back to what journalism, I think we'd all like to see it get back to which is continuity, reaching the market that you want to reach, reaching the people who care about the issue that you're covering.

Question: So the panelists' and everybody's interest in marketing issues and click-throughs and page views and so forth is only temporary?

Voice: That's because these Web sites are being supported by advertising. That's the model that everybody's gone with. But that doesn't mean that we have to stick with that. We're a non-profit organization. There are non-profit news organizations, and PR doesn't have those same pressures, and I think we need to look at these other models to get back to what news media should be, which is service to the public and not profit primarily.

John McChesney: NPR puts ads on its Web site, by the way. Another sign of creeping commercialism. (Laughter)

Voice: John, thank you very much. We ordered sunshine for lunchtime, and it's here. We'll reconvene at 1:30.

On to Panel 3: Credibility and the New Media

Back to: The Conference Program

Panelists and speakers at the conference came from a wide variety of new media companies and organizations.