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Panel 3: Credibility and the New Media

Orville Schell: ...This afternoon's panel is kind of where the rubber meets the road, some really serious issues for working journalists in the new media, being moderated by Paul Grabowicz who has been my partner in organizing this conference and who is the director of the new media center here at the graduate school of journalism.

Paul Grabowicz: Welcome.

Our panel is on credibility in the new media, and what we're going to be discussing here is in much more specific terms, I trust, some of the problems and pitfalls of this new industry that have been raised in the earlier sessions today.

There are going to be two broad areas we're going to cover. One having to do with business pressures that are being brought to bear on journalists in this business, and most specifically the breakdown in many cases of the classic wall between advertising and editorial content at new media sites.

The second issue has to do with the sort of round the clock, constant deadline phenomena of Web publishing, and competition from non-traditional news sources -- translated as Matt Drudge -- and what that does to our business and how do we retain our ability to put out credible, accurate stories in that kind of an environment.

I want to repeat a mantra that's been mentioned here earlier. These are not problems, obviously, that are specific to new media. Anybody who has... If there's anybody who's a representative of old media, it's me. I spent 17 years at the Oakland Tribune, which is about as old media as you can get, and I saw some of the same problems there. There's obviously a controversy at the LA Times over advertising and editorial and the wall there being broken down. Last year some of you may remember magazines - there was a flurry of activity because magazines were allowing some advertisers to sort of look at copy prior to publication. And in terms of media stampedes and rush to judgments and constant deadlines - Richard Jewell, O.J. Simpson, Monica Lewinsky, it didn't take new media to cause some problems there.

So I just want to emphasize that we're not picking on new media here, but because we're new, some of these problems I think are a little more poignant and there have been some new twists and turns that are a result of this different kind of medium.

So what I want to do is go right to our panelists. We're going to sort of go through these issues in succession.

I want to start with Lewis Perdue who is President of IdeaWorx, which is a new media company, who is founder of SmartWired, which is a Web information company. (He) previously worked for the Washington Post and Gannett newspapers.

Lewis, you've written a number of articles and actually set up a Web ethics site that's sort of a call to arms to address this problem of the erosion of advertising and editorial and the blending of it on many Web sites. I was hoping you could cite some examples of that problem and suggest how we can get ourselves out of the thicket that we've gotten into.

Lewis Perdue: One of the things, I think you're absolutely right. It's not picking on new media. I think that new media can create some expectations because I think there is an opportunity for integrity that new media can bring to the information and in a sense to avoid some of the mistakes of old media. Old media is expensive. It's very expensive, and a lot of the expensive nature of old media means that you have to make a lot of money and you have to have a lot of advertisers, and integrity tends to get lost in the numbers at some point. So one of my calls to arms for new media is for integrity to become something that the individuals involved with this, because the beauty of new media is that an individual can be the medium.

Some of the specific examples, there are really three levels of shall we call it new media prostitution. The grossest street-walker level of media prostitution are the sites out there that are completely paid and they don't let their advertisers know it. There was one called culinary.net, and it's a very nicely designed site. It's got [eye candy], it's got depth of content, and it's got no integrity at all. It's a www.culinary.net. They don't tell you that the whole thing is one giant ad. The tobacco companies tend to do this.

This happens frequently in the wine side. A couple of the publications I used to own are in the wine business, so I know that. It's a fun business to be in. There's one called drinkwine.com. My son printed out cartoons off the Web, I ran out of paper. But it's called drinkwine.com. You go into this and it just says it's created for individuals 24 years of age to provide the best winery information, blah, blah, blah, blah, and then they've got this list of wineries, every single one of them paid to be there. No disclosure. Once again, you need to tell people.

This happens all the time. Most of the time you go in the Web and you find a directory, it's just for the people who paid there. You go to napavalley.com, great URL, I wish I'd registered that one, and you get a list of featured wineries. There's your other tipoff, if it says it's a featured anything it's paid to be there.

Unfortunately, the specifics could go on and on and on. The Web has the danger of becoming one giant Guthy-Renker infomercial. I think the call for integrity right now is something that can either produce a movement of users on-line toward quality, or burn everybody out and have the Web dismissed and everything on-line dismissed as just another infomercial.

So I think those are the key issues facing on-line. They are not new media issues. They are old medium issues recast in a medium that gives us more opportunities to be dishonest. In print you can't sell a link from a word. In print you can't sell a key word that pops up on your page to put your advertisers up front. It's easier to hide the paid content on a Web site than it is in television or in print.

I think what we've got to look for here in terms of integrity is looking for ways to avoid the conflict of interest or looking for ways to announce that something is paid. There's nothing wrong with advertising. There's nothing wrong with any of the sort of things that serve the system that we have in supporting content, but the disclosure is there. If you have a banner, you have a graphic, you have something on the page that's a paid ad, you should say sponsored by, brought to you by, paid by, paid advertisement. Be right up front, because consumers of information are more savvy today than they've ever been before. Once you pull the wool over their eyes, they're going to be twice as angry next time.

So I think that one of the things that can be done, and we're going to hear more about CNET's code of ethics. We had a discussion. I think that it's key for people with new media to create the expectation among their users that the content will be created in a way that minimizes or eliminates conflicts of interest.

We were debating over lunch whether or not their code of ethics should be available on-line to all users. I come down on yes, I think it should be, and I think that yes, every site should have a code of ethics that they adhere to and put it up there to say we adhere to this code of ethics, and here, take a look at it. We won't do this, we won't do that, we will do this. I won't get into the specifics. But I think the only way for the Web to become self-policing is for the site owners, the site editors, the site publishers to create the expectation among users that the site is put together in an ethical way.

Paul Grabowicz: To help folks adopt those kinds of ethics we're going to turn to Phil Lemmons, who is Editorial Director of PC World, which oversees both PC World magazine and PC World Online in his various duties. Many of you may have seen this - about nine months ago PC World did a series of stories about this issue of the decay of the wall between advertising and editorial. Phil also drafted the American Society of Magazine Editors' Guidelines for New Media to deal specifically with this problem. Phil, I was hoping you could describe those guidelines and what problems they specifically were there to address.

Phil Lemmons: Okay. I'll be happy to do that, Paul.

The ASME Guidelines were intended to be the equivalent of some guidelines that exist for print magazines. I want to echo what everybody else has said, that the same source of problems, the same general sorts of problems exist in old media as in new. It's just that the arrival of new media, of the on-line medium, was used as an opportunity to try and blow away some old standards. There are marketing executives who say that the distinction between advertising and editorial is going to disappear, it's outlived its usefulness. And when you say but readers or viewers are entitled to know whether they're looking at independent content or at something that was paid for and under the control of an advertiser, they say oh, that's linear thinking.

It's interesting, deceptive advertising is actually illegal in the United States under the FTC Act, the Federal Trade Commission Act. The FTC under that law has the responsibility to come up with ways of preventing deceptive advertising. They've held that... I may not get the legal terms correct, but they've held that there can be deception that's substantial, or by substance, like saying this stuff will cure cancer when it won't in an ad, and that's something they pay attention to when there's that kind of deception. There can also be deception by form. That's when something that is not independent and it's really trying to push a product or a service or a company, masquerades as something else, and that's infomercials, it's unlabeled special advertising sections in magazines, and it's also some Web sites that are like the ones Lewis referred to.

ASME, the American Society of Magazine Editors, started having to deal with these issues because magazines started putting up a lot of Web sites and the editors assigned to those sites were being asked to do things or told to do things that they hadn't ever been asked to do or told to do before. They were saying what is ASME's position on this. So after this sort of thing started happening, I was asked to come up with a first draft of guidelines. I want to stress that there was a lot of discussion of these guidelines. They were changed considerably after I drafted them, so it's not as though I was the sole author.

The general idea was just to let people know whether what they're looking at is there because the editors of the publication working for the site decided it should be there, whether it represented independent opinion, or whether it was something that had been bought and paid for. The kinds of issues that had come up that led to the issuance of the guidelines were the sale of links and editorial content. What if someone on the advertising sales force in an article in a computer publication or a computer publication site sells a link to Compaq? What if Compaq paid to have a link to Compaq in the article? What if Compaq wasn't even in the article to start with? Essentially, you've sold editorial coverage. In print you don't do that if you're at all reputable. That sort of thing, and I'm not saying that I know of examples specific to the field of computers, but that sort of thing was happening, and that's the sort of thing that people were appealing to ASME to do something about.

So one of the provisions of this says that links are under the sole control of the editors and they can't be sold. No publication may sell outright or make a condition of any advertising sale, a link from its editorial content to any other site.

Another thing says the site has to say whose it is very prominently when you get to it, because you can have big deceptions starting up front if the site doesn't clearly identify itself.

It says in general terms, and there was a lot of debate about how to deal with this issue, that on all on-line pages this will be a clear distinction made between editorial an advertising content. Great freedom was left as to how to make that distinction, whether it's through words, design, placement, or any other effective method. The reason it was left so general is that this on-line media are new. There aren't contentions yet. And it wasn't clear to those of us working on the guidelines that we could prescribe the correct solution to this problem forever. But the general test is whether at a glance people can tell what's advertising and what's editorial. You pass the test if people can tell at a glance. If they have to work at it then the distinction isn't clear.

The phenomenon of the special advertising sections, and these are things that are written to order for advertisers. They look like editorial content. In print, the ASME guidelines say those have to be in a different font and a different design from the magazine. At the top of every page they have to have the word "advertisement" and that word has to be in type that is at least as large as the book face, the main text face used in the magazine.

Online things were appearing that were in fact paid content and they weren't labeled in any way. It's so easy to go from something that's independent editorial by a link into something that's not. The deception's really somewhat simpler than just flipping through a magazine.

Another big issue, and one that I didn't these guidelines resolved quite satisfactorily, is that publications shouldn't display their logos adjacent to or near the logo of another company. The exception these guidelines make, it says basically it's okay for what's called custom publishing. Custom publishing is when a publishing company creates a publication for an advertiser, and that is now an accepted practice in publishing . I think it's part of what's destroying the credibility of publishing where you'll have a custom publishing division -- the real editors of the publication don't work on it but there's this custom publishing division that creates books or magazines for companies with whom the publication wants to curry favor. That's called custom publishing. It's a very profitable business. It's a growth business. And it's happening on-line. In that field the logos are often displayed together, but I don't see how if we did custom publishing, for example, with Compaq, and you had the PC World logo and the Compaq logo next to each other, that people could believe us the next time we reviewed Compaq's computers. The logos would make us look too close together. So I think suspicions would be merited no matter how we handled that.

So what we tried to do, extending these guidelines within IDG our own parent company, and Sandy Reed of InfoWorld played a leading role in this, was to say that basically these logos can only appear together in true editorial joint ventures. So joint ventures with another publication, basically.

So that's some of the issues we dealt with, and Lewis also referred to a number that we dealt with.

Paul Grabowicz: If any of you want, we have copies of the ASME guidelines out on the table out there, along with a print version of Lewis' Web ethics page.

Steve Chin, Web consultant now, currently runs Monkey King Media consulting company, co-founder of Channel A, a contemporary Asian lifestyle Web site, and prior to that, a reporter with the San Francisco Examiner.

As co-founder of Channel A, and now as a Web site consultant, I'm sure you've had to deal firsthand with the sort of business pressures that are brought to bear on new media. I was wondering if you could describe what your experiences have been in the places that you've worked and how you've had to confront some of these problems.

Steven Chin: I guess I get to present the cautionary tale of creating a company where you actually do have an independent editorial channel and a retail channel on the Web.

The notion to create a Channel A site came in the sprint of '95. I was sitting at my cubicle at the Examiner reading a story about NetNoir which has just launched through the AOL Greenhouse and it just made sense to me to look at starting a commercially driven Asian-American Web site. Web was in its infancy. The catch phrase of the day was content was king. I had always dreamed about starting a national Asian-American magazine or some kind of wire service, so the Web, in a sense, for all the reasons everybody else has started companies, seemed like the right place to go, beyond just maybe smaller capitalization.

It overcame a lot of the traditional geographic and regional barriers of doing a print publication or even video or audio programming, and there were a lot of Asians on computers. So for those reasons it seemed like the right thing to do.

On the content side, I felt I had a strong network of some of the top Asian-American writers and thinkers who could really drive the engine for discussions around what it meant to be Asian in America in the '90s, on all fronts -- racial, political, economic, sexual. I was also busily aggregating a lot of the newsweeklies that were being published in different states, and I had about 30 of those publications ready to deliver content.

So it seemed like the right thing to do. Most importantly, I wanted to create a space in a home in cyberspace for Asian-Americans. I had been on the Web from its inception and on AOL and was not finding anything that really spoke to me around the identity issues that I was interested in, and which I was covering at the Examiner for many years.

I felt pretty optimistic about getting money because I knew there were a lot of entrepreneurs in the Valley who were Asian, and had started their own companies themselves, and I thought I could find some sympathetic ears. I managed to open a few doors, but it really wasn't until I actually took the idea to AOL Greenhouse and worked with them for about six months on programming that I kind of, that things started to click. I got a stamp of approval from them, and it was just a matter of putting a business team together.

I went back down into Silicon Valley again. I didn't really have a network of my business school friends or anything. I had done journalism most of my life. I ended up with a management team that consisted of consultants, McKenzie consultants and Harvard Business School grads, and they were working either in software, marketing, or in database startups. It seemed like a nice combination where we had the technology, we had the network in the Valley to bring in the newest technology that was being developed. So we ended up not taking the AOL money and we just went with money that was brought in through my management team.

I guess that's where things started to get rough because I was the only editorial person among all the investors and among all the management team. The notion of building a content site to them was intriguing, but it wasn't the end-all, which it was more for me creating a journalistic site. They were interested in bringing people through the content but driving them into a retail channel that we were developing. We devoted a lot of energy to building out a store which carries about a thousand products now, and also working through channels in Asia to actually bring in products directly from Asia, and work on cutting out the middle man which the Internet seems so perfect at doing.

So we started, I guess as management consultants tend to do, wanting to grid and graph everything, and the first place the turned was to the editorial process. So some of the questions that arose very early on were rating productivity. Beyond just making deadlines. ROI - return on investment - per story. What kind of stories were we going to do? Should the decision to write a story be based on how long it takes to create, design, and code?

Then we started struggling over the value of editorial contribution to the company versus the value of marketing or ad sales. Basically finding myself in the position of how much equity stake do the editorial people get versus these other teams, and they seem to be getting completely shafted.

So very quickly, we kind of bounced on all these obstacles of conflict. We had a marketing consulting arm where we would agree to help market people on the web, market their products, test market products, which meant developing infomercials so there was a struggle over how to basically create distinction between the real editorial product and we went through basically developing a code of ethics, but on a case by case basis, through visual language. How do we advertise products in the store on the pages that we were actually creating content? And partnerships. Things like deals with book companies, and how would this affect the tone of the article as they're reviewed? Knowing that if we printed a negative story, it could result in little or no sales, and that was a waste of resources.

To close, we were in a startup mode. We were selling basically a content retail model to investors with the intent on IPOing in a few years. So like all startups in that framework, your goal is to hit your milestones in revenue while creating grand equity and making the most of your resources.

What happened was, I guess when we were low on funding and knew that we needed to go out for another round we actually secured money in Asia in November and then the Asian financial crisis hit, and the money was pulled before we actually got any. Immediately the pressure came down on the content side which was not producing any revenue directly.

We had this term called "lookers to bookers", and this goes back to the use of tracking where really your site can be one big focus group. You know exactly who's getting the hits and where the interest is.

We could also tell who was coming to the site, looking at our content, and then going into the store. So the pressure came on the executive editor to drive more traffic to the store. You can do that in two ways. You can either market the hell out of the site in the appropriate places, really going after a consumer audience rather than the so-called Asia watchers which was our initial target audience. The other way is to alter your editorial, to make your products and the Asian lifestyle that we were selling more intriguing. We didn't have the budget for the marketing, so it basically came down to changing editorial. That's where I decided to step out, and eventually the whole editorial team was either laid off or quit.

Today we have the new Channel A, which was relaunched today under the Modern Asia Living brand. It's really trying to capture this Asian Martha Stewart space, which is very different than what I intended to set out to create. That's the tale.

Paul Grabowicz: If you haven't been depressed enough so far, now we have Dan Gillmor. (Laughter) Technology columnist for the San Jose Mercury News, who is obviously very well known, highly respected in the community, and I say if you haven't been depressed enough, because he's going to put yet another depressing wrinkle on this new media stuff.

His column is syndicated around the country. About two years ago Dan wrote a column about the dilemmas posed for journalists when the media companies at which they work started getting into partnerships and other kinds of affiliations with non-media companies. I understand there's another column coming soon from Dan on this topic.

At the time, one of the issues Dan raised was his Knight-Ridder's partnerships with America Online, because the Merc Center was on (AOL). I was hoping you could talk about some of those relationships and the problems that they pose for journalists.

Dan Gillmor: Thanks. Before I say anything else, this is really an amazing program you all have put together here today. I think it's great that this kind of thing is being brought up, and we should do it more often.

Two years ago when I did that column, the major point I wanted to bring out was... Well, there were two. One was that these partnerships and alliances raised new interesting problems for people who do journalism, and I'm here representing the cost center side of the operation. That is to say we cost money, we don't bring it in. I also in that column wanted to point out loudly that I was speaking from a very transparent glass house. That we had our own share of these entanglements, and that as far as I could tell we would continue to.

At the time we were a partner with AOL for Merc Center that ended, and Mercury Center went on the Web, as all of the Knight-Ridder papers have done. We were also at that time, Knight-Ridder was an investor in Netscape. We have since sold that at I believe an appropriate time, made a big profit.

What we were doing on Netscape and other companies in which we had investments was to put in a disclaimer in our stories that said if we wrote something that was substantially about Netscape rather than a peripheral mention, we'd say "Knight-Ridder, corporate parent of the Mercury News, is an investor in Netscape" and let readers make whatever they wanted to make of that statement. But it was necessary, we thought, to have these disclosures.

These are going to get more and more complicated. I want to just quickly go over a few things that are happening now, simply to raise the question.

What we're finding is that not only is this not black and white, it is so infinitely gray that we are going to have to just deal with it and recognize that the convergence of media forces upon us as journalists the problem that we're going to be covering, companies that we are partners with or part of or in various ways doing different things with.

The recent example of the New York Times book review on the Web, which points to the Barnes and Noble site, as I understand it; and as I also understand it, they get a cut if Barnes and Noble sells a book off of that link. That strikes me personally as improper. I don't know what the outcome of that was, but I wouldn't think that's a proper thing to do for the New York Times, of all people.

Intel is doing an interesting thing with advertisers, Web advertisers. They are paying... Phil knows the details better on this than I do, but I gather it's about 75 percent of the cost for advertisers who put up advertising content that can only be viewed properly if you have a Pentium 2 in your computer.

Voice: Intel has backed down from that program under protest.

Dan Gillmor: Good. There are only two sites I know of that are still complying with it and they don't have to. They're just willful.

Paul Grabowicz: It's interesting that Intel backed down as opposed to...

Dan Gillmor: That, too, was just sort of to me obviously improper, but let's look at something that's not that distant from it.

Intel pays in a cooperative advertising way, the vast majority of the cost for PC manufacturers who put print ads and TV ads out. Is that a significant difference? It's different, yes, but how much so?

One of the things that just came up that was alluded to at the start was not a partnership, but a situation that has put, I believe, Knight-Ridder into a problematic position. The column that I'm writing for tomorrow, which is one reason I'm going to have to bolt out of here at the end of this panel to get it so that I'm happy with it. On Monday there was an announcement of a new coalition that they call ProComp. It's short for some endless thing about competition, promoting competition in the digital era. The reality of that organization is that it is pretty much designed as a put a stop to the Microsoft monopoly kind of organization . That's the fundamental goal, I think, though it's not put that way. They certainly are outspoken about it. I was thinking on Monday when this was announced, when they got Robert Bork, the former appeals judge who wrote the book on why antitrust should almost never be enforced. He was one of the people who had signed onto this thing, and that was interesting. The fact that he's also now on retainer to Netscape was interesting. But I thought it was interesting and worth talking about because this is a guy who refused to cut his positions in order to get a seat on the Supreme Court, so he had some credibility in that sense.

Anyway what happened, it turned out was, I didn't do a column for Tuesday because it developed that Knight-Ridder new media was an endorser of this ProComp group.

Well, I'm struggling with this, but I don't think we should have done that. And I don't think it's wrong for the corporation to take a stand on issues affecting the corporation in the basic, straight forward corporate sense because companies do that sort of thing. We do things as a company, take stands on issues. We provide partner benefits for gay couples. That's a stand on a political issue whether anyone wants to admit it or not.

The problem for us in the newsroom of the Mercury News, which is in Silicon Valley -- the hometown paper for Netscape, Sun, and a few others that are interested observers and more, is that we're now on their side as a company on this issue.

Well, we have a new disclaimer that's going on stories. But I really wish we hadn't done this. I'm trying to find the nicest possible way to say so in a column tomorrow.

Let me finish my little portion here by saying what I think needs mostly to happen in this infinitely gray world that we're going into is we must, as journalism organizations cover each other with the same zeal that we apply to the other people we cover on these issues of conflicts of interest and the other kinds of squirrely kinds of stuff that goes on every day, and we all know it does. We should be out chasing each other up and down the block saying, letting the public know who's doing the slippery stuff, and let it fall where it will and we will all do a better job if we get that old sunshine on these practices. That's my hope at any rate.

Paul Grabowicz: We're going to shift over to a related but somewhat different problem now. This is actually both an opportunity and a problem. The opportunity is to publish and break stories on the Web. The downside of that is that sometimes the stuff you publish on the Web you wish you hadn't.

Dale Peskin, Assistant Managing Editor of the Dallas Morning News, who manages the paper's Web site, and previously was Deputy Managing Editor of the Detroit News. Those of you may remember last year the Dallas Morning News was widely praised because it broke on its Web site what was probably the first major story by a major publication about the confession of Timothy McVey.

Recently the Dallas Morning News has come under scrutiny because of a Monica Lewinsky story that also came out first on its Web page.

So Dale, I was hoping you could talk about what happened in both of those instances and what lessons you all learned from that.

Voice: Is it true?

Dale Peskin: If the story's not sourced, I'm sure it is. (Laughter)

I feel that I'm here as sort of a poster child for what's right and wrong about online news, and let me talk a little bit about that. I'm here essentially because of two stories, and I think that's a little unfortunate. A lot goes on in a newsroom and an on-line publication on a daily basis that over time I think tells about the credibility of that organization and what it means for the news.

The first story that I'm here to talk about was a story that the Dallas Morning News broke in February 1997 when it reported on its on-line site, DallasNews.com, that Timothy McVey had admitted to his defense attorneys that he had indeed bombed the federal building in Oklahoma City and did so to raise a body count. That story was widely praised by a lot of people. We did that about 12 hours before it appeared in our printed publication, and it was widely praised by most people with the exception of some newspapers like the New York Times, that this was the beginning of a new era. That newspapers were back in the "breaking news" business and a media saved. After that we felt we had done mostly the right thing.

Then about a year later, in January of this year, we published a story on the Internet for about two hours based on several sources that Monica Lewinsky was seen in a compromising position with Bill Clinton, by two people who were in a position to know that information. Most everybody agrees publishing that story was not a very good idea. There were good reasons for that.

What occurred in both stories is that neither one was really about new media and the Internet. The Web didn't make us do it.

At the Dallas Morning News and in many publications there is a common reporting and editing staff that applies standards and issues, and anybody who knows anything about the Dallas Morning News knows that it's a fairly conservative newspaper that's extraordinarily careful with information that goes through an exhausting checks and balances kind of system of information.

It worked well in the McVey story. It fell apart in the Lewinsky story. That was about old media rather than new media.

What was largely reported was that this was a story that was pushed into publication because of the Internet and thus we got it wrong. That wasn't the situation at all. The story was essentially typeset for the first edition of the newspaper and sent to our Web site at the same time and appeared in the first editions of the newspaper, and also went out on the Web site after meeting all the standards.

What occurred was this. This occurs at about 10:00 p.m. Central Time at night, so when it went out on the Web site it immediately became news to lots of people. Indeed, the topic of Nightline that very night was the same story, and Ted Koppel began talking with people on his show about this story, as did Larry King.

In the course of about a half hour, phones were ringing in at both the White House and to one of our sources who provided us with that information. By the end of Nightline the source called back and said well, I don't think I really said what you're reporting. So it was a classic case of what we call in the industry "source remorse". After publication a source changes his mind.

Our standard in this was, and this was a standard that was mostly established during Watergate, of two independent sources who were in a position to know. Between the time we published and the end of Nightline, one of our two sources had changed his mind, so we had no recourse other than to say we're going to pull the story because it no longer met a standard of reporting in old media, essentially, that had occurred. So the story was pulled and it was pulled from the first edition of the newspaper.

What kind of lessons have we learned about all of this? I think one of the lessons that we learned is the standard for sourcing in old media is not very good, and that standard has changed in our newsroom. We're going to be more careful about that from now on, that maybe two independent sources is not enough -- certainly for a story like this. And there's no question about that.

But it also I think gave us an indication of things that were the same about new media and things that were different about it. Suddenly we were in a position that information was going to go beyond the range of a delivery truck a lot faster than it travels by print and is distributed to people. That has given us pause to think about what goes on-line as well, and the impact that both speed and audience have on a story, and that's changing.

That's essentially the situation, and if there are questions about the details that I can address on that later as we share this around, I'm happy to talk about this.

Paul Grabowicz: Thank you, Dale. That's actually heartening. It's been said that there's a lot of misinformation on the Web, but the good thing about it is it gets corrected very quickly, and what's interesting in this case is that the Web actually forced the print product to fix the story. If it hadn't been on the Web it would have been sitting there in a full run of the print edition and it would have been 24 hours later probably before it got addressed.

… J.D. Lasica,…Copy Chief of Microsoft San Francisco Sidewalk, a key player in developing its online city guide, writes a regular new media column for the American Journalism Review and previously was an editor and columnist for the Sacramento Bee. You've written about this getting-it-fast versus getting-it-right dilemma in (the) American Journalism Review. I'm hoping you can cite some examples of this and talk about the sort of problem that we're facing and how journalists basically can make sure that they get it right and fast, both.

J.D. Lasica: Good afternoon, everybody. I've got about eight minutes of comments which I will try to get down to seven by speaking fast.

I'm going to be wearing two hats today. The first half of my remarks are going to be on the subject of Matt Drudge and journalistic standards in the on-line world, and I'll be addressing that topic in my role as new media critic for the American Journalism Review. I did devote two columns to the subject of speed versus accuracy in it, the second of which I wrote a week after Monicagate first broke. Thanks to the wonders of magazine deadlines, it's finally made its way into the current copy of AJR, which we passed out before.

The second part of my remarks I'd like to make as Copy Chief of San Francisco Sidewalk, and if there are any reporters in this room who are covering this panel, I'd like to underline that none of my remarks about Matt Drudge or journalistic standards are in any way, shape, or form related to my role at Microsoft, and I'd be happy to meet with any reporters after this panel.

Now wearing my AJR hat, I have to tell you that I don't think Matt Drudge is the antichrist of journalism. He may be the bad boy of the net, but he certainly does not represent Web journalism as a whole. To hold him up as the symbol of all that's wrong with new media I think wildly over-inflates his role in this whole sordid affair. I think it also underestimates the intelligence of his readers.

Users do not go to the Drudge report for trustworthy news, they go for titillating, Beltway cocktail party chatter that may or may not be true. It's sort of journalism light.

I understand that Drudge in the past has sort of balked at the term journalist, and one of the real ironic asides in all this is that were we've got a gossip columnist who refuses to be tarred with the epithet journalist. (Laughter)

Drudge has now joined Fox News and I just found out he'll be the guest speaker June 2nd at the National Press Club. So I would suggest to Mr. Drudge that if he doesn't want his new show to be the scariest half hour on television, he can't have it both ways any longer. You simply cannot be a professional journalist and simply pass along gossip, rumor, innuendo without at minimum doing some independent reporting to verify whether it's true or not.

I know that in some quarters in the Net, in some places on news scripts, Drudge is kind of a hero. There's a certain glamour to Drudge and other sort of lone wolf reporters to go thumbing their noses not only at big media but also at everything that the mainstream media represent, and that includes its ethical play book. But I think in the long run that position is going to lose out.

Drudge once said that his reports are about 80 percent accurate. Personally I think his batting average is closer to Ken Griffey Jr.'s, which ain't bad, but it's not good enough for real solid journalism. You need to have a fact checking process and I think that's what users are going to demand from trusted news sources on the Web -- authentication and context setting.

With all the noise out there, and it's not just on the Net. It's in the entire media soup that we're all swimming in, the public wants journalism that it can trust, and that means news outlets need to reach back to core values of accuracy and credibility and balance. And it means that you need to check what you report instead of reporting before you check.

What I see happening all too often in news organizations that rush to put unsubstantiated second-hand reports from anonymous sources onto the airways and onto the Net, and I'm not really talking about Dallas because they did have two sources verify this. But I would suggest a couple of things for these news organizations. First, for God's sake, show some backbone. Stand up to sloppy reporting. Draw a line against innuendo and hearsay and speculation masquerading as news. Remember that you're still in the business of truth telling, even if it takes you an extra few minutes or an extra hour to get at the truth.

Second, and I'm surprised, I don't think I've ever seen this anywhere on the Net, and correct me if I'm wrong. But I would love to see news organizations use their fact checking machinery to give you users a sort of running tally of what we know or what we don't know about a story, whether it's the White House sex scandal or Princess Di's death or some other breaking news that sort of takes on a life of its own on the Net. Tell us okay, here's what's known, here's what these other outlets have reported but we can't verify, here's what's going on in usernet news groups, and here's what we know to be total bullshit. I think in this age of info-glut, it's not good enough to say "according to published reports". Readers want to know where that report originated so they can make their own judgment about its reliability.

I want to conclude this part of my remarks with a quote from Ted Koppel who I interviewed last summer in his first interview about the Internet. He said, "Reporting is not really about let's see who can get the first information to the public as quickly as possible. It's about, let's see who can get the information to the public as soon as we've had a chance to make sure the information is accurate, to weigh it against what we know, to put it in some sort of context. If we're moving into an era in which reporters are pressured to get it on-line before we have a chance to check and edit the material, if speed is the main criteria of putting something on line, then I think that's going to rear up and bite us in the ass." And I guess I shouldn't be surprised that Ted used the word "ass", not after that Nightline he did on oral sex and the presidency.

Quickly, just wrapping up, I'm going to put on my hat for San Francisco Sidewalk. That's today's front page of Sidewalk, which I write every day.

What we've done with Sidewalk from the beginning is to sort of give information to people with time compressed lives so they can make better decisions about where to go and what to do in their communities, and we've been very successful. We've launched in nine cities. We plan to reach consumers in a total of 50 markets by the end of this year. You can find anything from the best place to find African cuisine south of Market, to great B&B getaways in Napa Valley, to complete coverage of the San Francisco Film Festival, which starts today by the way, and along with stories and listings you'll get maps and ratings and price information. We'll even tell you where to go to try to find parking.

We've got a staff of two dozen people with backgrounds in magazines, newspapers, Web publications, and the vast majority of those staffers are dedicated entirely to creating great local original content, and all that content comes through my desk and we give it the same rigorous vetting process you'd find at any newspaper copy desk.

In the past 13 months I've been in roughly like 50,000 meetings, and I can tell you that there is a true separation of truth and state that goes on in Sidewalk in the sense that promotion will talk to us in editorial, but they don't tell us what to cover and we don't tell them what to promote. There's no misleading blurring of advertising editorial in our site. It's made clear to the readers that these are contests and promotions and not stories. None of the listings you'll find on our site are bought or paid for by advertisers. Of the more than 5,000 stories and editorial entities on our site, not a single one contains a link bought or paid for by the advertisers. Lastly and most importantly, in my view, the Sand Francisco Sidewalk has editorial integrity. The restaurant reviews tell is like it is. There are a lot more one and two star restaurant reviews on our site than three or four star restaurants, just like there are more mediocre or middling restaurants out there than superb restaurants in the real world.

Our mantra from the beginning has been to provide valid, credible, accurate, and honest information to people to help them make their lives easier, and that's how you build loyalty and drive your usage higher, and that loyal and committed readership is what will attract merchants and turn Sidewalk into a profitable, successful business enterprise. Thanks.

Paul Grabowicz: Kathleen deLaski, Director of news programming for America Online, and previously spent five years as Washington correspondent for ABC News. America Online is home of Drudge.

I guess the question for you is, is Matt Drudge's report news? And how does America Online handle Matt Drudge? And if you have any other thoughts about the pressures that are being brought to bear on reporters to get the stories first on the Web.

Kathleen deLaski: If I could have predicted to the people who brought Drudge to AOL that every time I was on a panel I would be turned to as the expert on Matt Drudge... I have met Matt Drudge one time. He was brought through the newsroom when they signed the contract, and I was told that the entertainment division had done a deal with him. Just as I'm sure that Jerry Springer has met Dan Rather, maybe, maybe not. Not that the Jerry Springer Show is syndicated. It's not necessarily done by CBS. But we feel victimized today, well news.

If you think of the TV Guide which is a very nice, tactile, visual representation to make the following point, and you look at sort of maybe 9:00 o'clock a.m. on the CBS affiliate in San Francisco and you see the Jerry Springer show, and then maybe at noon you've got Days of Our Lives, and at 4:00 o'clock you've got Hard Copy; at 7:00 o'clock you've got the CBS Evening News. The viewer knows that these are not in any way related, and that one should not be held at the same level as the other. Dan Rather doesn't get asked at conferences about the Jerry Springer show. And the problem is that... Now think of the TV Guide and the day's listings for Channel 5, the CBS affiliate here, and you could hyperlink between all the different shows, and you can hyperlink from Jerry Springer to Dan Rather. And that's when it becomes a problem.

So what we've tried to construct at AOL News, and it only works to the extent that the member understands this thing that we're setting up, is that we don't hyperlink to Matt Drudge. That's about the only defense I have as the head of AOL News. I say I don't link to him. But you can key word to Matt Drudge. We have a key word system instead of an URL system when you're on AOL.

So what I present to you, and I think I may be the only person here representing one of the dreaded aggregators today. I don't know if anyone else here... Everyone else is from a real journalistic concern. Actually, much more of the news consuming on-line is done through the aggregators at this point, and those of us like Pathfinder and AOL and to some extent Snap, which I guess is in a way represented here today, when you're a network, and Steve mentioned this when he talked about the shopping arm versus the journalistic arm. You really have a whole new set of problems that we need help addressing, which is should the standards of one of your channels be held to the standards of another of your channels?

We have very different ethics than our own entertainment channel does. We have certainly different ethics than our shopping channel does. We don't hyperlink to the Barnes and Noble ad from the book review, and in fact I don't think the New York Times does either. The New York Times is one of our partners and their policy on AOL, certainly, and I think it's the same on the Web, Kevin could confirm this, is that there's no hyperlink from the book review in the story. There's a separate, which clearly looks like an advertisement button where you can go to Barnes and Noble. That is the dichotomy that we set up as well. But our shopping center doesn't have that same rule, as they shouldn't. You go there to shop.

Then there are some channels, which really are, the whole purpose of the channel is to be sort of a buying guide. Our computing channel, for instance, is really to help you understand how to buy a computer. So they have different rules than we're going to have in the news channel, and that makes sense.

So we have to I think help the consumer understand the difference between the different channels on-line, the same as they would understand the difference between different television shows when they're watching television.

As a new news brand, and I notice that when the CNET representative was up earlier, he sounded more defensive about excellence in journalism than some of the traditional brands did, and I certainly understand that because we, like CNET, are a new news brand. AOL News has been around since 1985, and we have six million households -- AOL is 12 million, but six million of those households regularly use the news channel as one of their major news sources, and that's a huge number of people. When you have that kind of an audience you have to take your journalism very seriously -- even though we are not on the street reporting stories. We have to have very strict guidelines and we mirror the guidelines that our partners such as the New York Times and Newsweek and ABC News and AP and Reuters, we mirror their guidelines to a large extent, but we have to set up our own guidelines, too, for headline writing and hyperlinking. We try to err on the side of caution since we are a new news brand, and we don't... We can't afford to misstep in the same way that even, I would submit, the Dallas Morning News can afford a misstep. They have however many years of tradition on their side. So we try to be really, really careful.

For instance, we wouldn't point to a story from the Dallas Morning News until one of our news partners has, then that's when we make the... Once it's in the AP, then we point to the AP story, and then we'll hyperlink to the Dallas Morning News. But that's just our rule, that we take the lead of our news partners.

Finally, I wanted to make a point on a slightly different subject about the deadline, the speedup of deadlines and how all the hand wringing that's been done in the past year over how new media has brought chaos to the deadline process.

I come from television news and as a White House correspondent and as just a Washington correspondent starting from the early '80s, I found it really interesting that we watched all this happen with the onset of cable TV, and when you had CNN and then when they started having competition like MSNBC in the '90s, you really saw that phenomenon happening then. We saw unsourced things get said all the time. The difference was, as someone was pointing out earlier during our lunch, is that it wasn't written down. So you could get away with it and people didn't despair. We also always had the New York Times and the print media, all the different print media, to sort of rely on. They were the voice of record, and television could afford to be a little more reckless and certainly was considered journalistically less skillful and believable as a result.

Now it sort of raises the question is anyone left minding the story? I think that's really the concern of people like Ted Koppel.

Paul Grabowicz: Thank you. The last speaker, and (then) we'll get to questions, will be Clair Whitmer, who is Features Editor of CNET.com and previously did editing for InfoWorld, Mac Week, and has been a technology journalist for 11 years.

CNET has an ethics policy that Clair helped draft, and what we wanted her to talk about is what is in that ethics policy and what issues, many of which we've talked about here today, it was designed to address.

Clair Whitmer: ...I'd just like to describe what is in this code of conduct and tell you why we wrote it. But first I'd like to speak real briefly to this issue of deadlines and the idea that online editors are more subject to deadline pressures than other editors. I've worked for dailies, weeklies, monthlies, and now on-line, and my experience has been actually quite the opposite of that. Five minutes to deadline is five minutes to deadline, no matter where you're working. But if I'm an editor for a print publication and it's five minutes to deadline, I have five minutes to make the decision about whether or not to run a story. If I'm working on-line, I don't have to make that decision in five minutes. I can stay there for another two or three hours torturing the reporter until I'm satisfied with it, and I'll still have time to beat the morning papers.

So in fact I feel like I've been less subject to deadlines pressure on-line than I was when the presses are waiting for me. So that's another perspective on this question.

Back to the code of conduct that we wrote. This happened last fall at some point, and we've posted it to our internal Web site so that all new employees and existing employees can read it. At the time it wasn't intended, I don't think, as a defense mechanism. Everybody that I worked with had come from print publications, and it just felt natural and logical for us to have an on-line equivalent of what we were used to having, a written policy of your code of conduct, your code of ethics.

About the same time that we were involved in it, however, an LA Times story came out that attacked us over a particular story and said we had published something that was inaccurate because of excessive deadline pressures.

So without going into the specifics of that particular fight, it became clear to us that we did need to plant a stake in the ground and make a point that on-line media does have that [fix] and that they're not that dissimilar from any other kind of media. So we came up with this code of conduct.

Most of it is actually borrowed from what we were used to working with, the written policies that we'd all been working under before for print publications. It covers things like gifts and services and travel, no junkets, you can't hold stock in companies that you cover regularly. Non-disclosure agreements and whether or not we would or would not sign them. These are all things which are common concerns and common problems in trade magazines or any kind of publication.

There is some stuff, however, in here which we decided was relevant to on-line only and which we came up with. I think that CNET is one of the few, I think New York Times has one as well, the on-line publication, that does have a code of conduct which addresses some of these issues.

The first thing we decided is that as a company, CNET is not just a publisher, it's also a player in the industry. We do have investments and affiliations with other companies that we cover, and that we would disclose those on each and every reference to one of these companies in our stories. The big example is, of course, Intel, which I think has six percent, that number might not be right, six percent of CNET. And in every story that we do on Intel, we say Intel is an investor in CNET, the computer network.

I know that Intel doesn't affect our coverage, and I think Intel knows that because we certainly have slammed them many, many times. The disclosure is intended, of course, to let the reader know that Intel has nothing to do with our coverage of them.

The next section, and there is a copy of this outside, is about corrections and clarifications. This was something that was a real problem, and is a problem because of mechanics of publishing on the Web. That you can fix stuff. You get it wrong, and you can go in and correct it and it's as if the first version never existed. You can cover your tracks that way if you are so inclined. So we decided that we would not do that, and if there was any question of a fact that was inaccurate or an interpretation of a story, that we wanted to change in substance, that we would post a correction to the Home Page, the front page of our publication, letting the reader know that this story has been changed and this is the problem that was in the story.

We also keep it permanently in the story that the reader looks at. So if you see a story, it will say at the bottom -- "Correction. This has changed from the original version." And then we fess up to what the problem was in the posted correction on the front page. Not all other on-line media is actually doing this.

Updating news stories, that's the same thing. We try to let the reader know if we've updated something. Even if it's not necessarily something that was wrong, but new information has been added, and tell the reader when it was originally reported.

The other thing is use of hyperlinks. Some of the other panelists have reported to hyperlinks being sold to advertisers. CNET doesn't do that. All of our hyperlinks are free to the reader, and we felt like the use of hyperlinks is one of the main benefits of publishing on the Web, so why would we want to get rid of that in order to adhere to some snow white, pure, idea of ethics when this is a real reader service, being able to connect them to other information about the subject that we're covering.

So our policy on this is not specific. The policy is that it's up to the editor to decide when to use hyperlinks and when not to. But in practice, what we've decided is to use them whenever possible, to link to everybody so that nobody can say that we're weighting a story by linking more to one side of an issue than to the voices that are representative of the other side in the story.

However, there are some exceptions. Sometimes we've covered neo-Nazi sites or pornography sites, and we have often decided not to link to them because we don't want to be interpreted as endorsing that material. But again, this is always up to the decision of the editor. We would never sell a hyperlink in our story. But this is the real issue, is that there are other people that would, so we end up being tainted by affiliation, all of us in new media, by the mistakes, what we think are mistakes, of others.

Paul Grabowicz: Questions?

Question: I want to make a brief plug for an upcoming panel, and I have a question. The plug is the Society of Professional Journalists of which I'm a member (inaudible), is having a panel on June 17th at the Marines Memorial Club in San Francisco. The panel is with SPJ's new media executive roundtable, which is a new group, and it's going to discuss these kinds of issues -- how to deal with editorial advertising and e-commerce. So if you're interested, please come to that, and if you want more information go to sfgate.com, go to the index, and look for the Society of Professional Journalists' page. Thanks.

My question is for Phil Lemmons. I wonder if you could update us on what ASME is deciding on whether to admit on-line journalists as members. Last I heard, that was still being debated.

Phil Lemmons: Actually, the debate is over and the decision was made to admit them. ASME membership is limited not quite just to chief editors, but to very senior editors, but there's going to be some kind of program to admit those editors.

The concern in developing the program is to, there really is some fear that the membership of print editors will be overwhelmed by the membership of Web sites that are mostly... The major ones aren't the concern. The concern is very small Web sites of every stripe that might not have accepted journalistic standards and therefore might quickly erode the standards that have been built up in the magazine community.

So the desire is to integrate the new media editors as fast as possible, but to try to figure out some way to do that without risking the standards. It's not settled exactly how to do it. Nor will it be my decision.

Question: I have a question for Ms. deLaski from AOL. The main defense that AOL is using in the lawsuit, $30 million libel lawsuit that has been filed against America Online and Matt Drudge, is the small provision in the Communications Decency Act which basically makes Internet service providers not legally liable for so-called content that gets published on their services. I know for this very reason Louis Rossetto probably goes to sleep at night saying I'm glad we dropped Drudge from Wired news, because Drudge was a columnist on Wired news for awhile, but he was dropped before this whole lawsuit was filed.

But my question for you, Ms. deLaski is, I think a really strong argument can be made that America Online is not only an Internet service provider, but they are fulfilling a publishing role in their on-line commercial service. The selection that goes into deciding who are the partners for America Online, who are the contra providers. There's other positioning that goes on in the Web site that has editorial functions to it. I'm wondering, do you think America Online, is that defense going to hold up in court? Do you think that's going to be a viable defense for your company? (Laughter)

Paul Grabowicz: You won't believe what a softball you just threw. (Laughter)

Kathleen deLaski: "AOL off the hook in Drudge suit." Have you seen this? The judge took us out of the case yesterday. (Laughter)

Voice: It doesn't mean he was right.

Kathleen deLaski: I've been asked not to talk about the ruling except that he used the CDA as... He cited CDA as the reason, and I've got an MSNBC article right here if anybody wants to read it. Forgive me. It's a Washington Post article.

Question: Richard Gingras, the @home Network. I also work within the midst of a veritable infestation of 26 year old Harvard MBAs who quite frankly do see this as a new frontier with no rules, who barely recognize that a profession like ours has a code of ethics, and whose own code of ethics is defined by the P&L statement. So it's a pretty tough row to hoe.

A point on Mr. Perdue's comments earlier which I thought was very valid, the notion of us having a code of ethics on our site and very clearly available to everyone makes a tremendous amount of sense. Not necessarily easier to pull off, but it makes a tremendous amount of sense.

What makes it easier to do I think are two things. One is the fact that your competitor is doing it. And the second is the fact that maybe the audience understands that these are valid issues. So I would extend the proposal for that matter beyond the world of the Web, because when I look out at today's traditional media -- print magazines, newspapers and so on -- I don't see these codes of ethics available either. I don't see on the masthead of a newspaper saying we have a code of ethics, here's where you can get it. I don't see a newspaper saying on Sundays, for instance, we've got a page in our editorial section. Here's our code of ethics and here's why it exists. Because I think it's extremely important for us to get that word out to people as well. People don't recognize these issues. And I think if traditional media started doing that as well, we would see carryover effect to the on-line space. Comments if you wish.

Lewis Perdue: Can I add to that? I think as somebody who's been both a journalist and a publisher where not so much my code of ethics but how to pay the rent was dependent on the P&L, the editorial product is a product. Take a step back and look at it as a manufacturing product -- not just journalism, not just information. Maybe it's a car. News is your product. When you adulterate your product by making it sleazy in these deals with advertising, you eventually produce an inferior product, which ironically means that you don't have as much to sell advertising against. So the best world for advertising and for profits, and I've been able to show this on a P&L, is good solid, irresistible, honest journalism. And I think if you're honest, you need to flaunt it. I think that's a competitive advantage that a site that's got it ought to let people know they've got it. I think Sidewalk...

I'm finishing a 12-step program as one of the original Microsoft network independent content providers. (Laughter) We're a fairly large group and it was a traumatic experience. But the one thing that I have to say is that your comments about Sidewalk make me take a whole other look at Sidewalk because even though I have some feeling for what's going on here, I kind of thought this was just another advertorial. You ought to flaunt it. If you're honest, flaunt it.

J.D. Lasica: Can I follow up on that a little bit? I'm not going to talk about Sidewalk so much as we were kidding Clair a little bit over lunch about the fact that they've got this really tremendous ethics policy, it's really one of the best I've ever seen over at CNET and I hope we've got some available on the table out there so you'll grab one. But you won't be able to call it up, or the whole thing up on the Web. I think that's a real mistake. I think even though some of these are sort of isolated kind of pockets of interest to only a few individuals, it greatly adds to any publication's credibility to sort of, if they've got an ethics policy, if they've got some sort of standards, it adds to your credibility and your trustworthiness to show people exactly how things run inside the operation.

Clair Whitmer: We are in discussions right now of posting parts of the ethics policy. I'm not sure how much of it, but certainly the parts about our affiliation to the Web site so that there is a permanent archive of who our partners are and who our investors are. This is judged in internal discussions to be the most relevant part of the ethics policies to readers, although I personally, as we said at lunch time, think that it would be a good idea to post the whole thing to the Web site.

We did just post a privacy policy about our use of information that we gather from readers and registration forms based on the e-trust model which is basically saying that we're not going to sell it to other people, although there are publications that do that. And so there is a precedent for us publishing parts of our ethics policy. The privacy policy is an extension of the work that we started with this code of conduct, and that is publicly available. If I see my boss shaking his head, then we'll probably post more of our written code of conduct on the Web site as well.

J.D. Lasica: Why don't you post it on your site?

Clair Whitmer: It's an internal policy. It's something that is written not for the public, it's written for our employees. If you look at the language of it, it's not intended as a defense of new media. It's intended as very specific guidelines for reporters. What do you do? How do you act? What stocks can you own? How do you use hyperlinks? So the genesis of it was not, as I said earlier, not intended to be a self defense at all, it was intended to be guidelines for our reporters, a management tool. It wasn't conceived of as a way of impressing the readers or proving to the public that yes, we had ethics because we assumed that they knew that. But this debate has gotten so heated, that if it's valuable as a tool for establishing what we know to be the case, that we have a very high standard of ethics in terms of our coverage of the industry, then good for us.

Question: Are there any employees (inaudible)...

Clair Whitmer: No, this [isn't] an editorial policy. It's not that it doesn't apply to other people, it's that it's not written for other people. Advertising people have their own... I don't know if they have a written policy at CNET, but it's not relevant to other employees. It's for editorial people. Although it does apply to anybody who has anything to do with producing the content.

Question: Dale, did you flack your story, the scoop that you had about Monica Lewinsky? Or was the news transmitted through the AP? Is that how everybody found out about it? My second question, were your sources Joe diGenova and his law clerk... (Laughter)

Dale Peskin: I'll answer the first part. (Laughter)

Question: Confirm or deny, sir.

Dale Peskin: I think anybody in Washington who's covered this story know who had information about it and who was talking to who. People covering the story in Washington, there's a pretty small network of information and a lot of people were talking to a lot of the same people.

The first matter is yeah. We didn't flack it to AP, but under our contract with the Associated Press, it went out on the AP wire. But independently, our Web site is, and I think largely because of what we did with the McVey story, is monitored a lot by CNN, by Nightline and others.

Question: Did you pitch the story to Nightline?

Dale Peskin: We did not. They saw it independently.

Clair Whitmer: It is another interesting point that although I said earlier that I didn't feel like deadline pressures was actually as severe on an on-line site because you can play with time more than you can in print, but it does affect the nature of the scoop. If I post something that I know is an exclusive and five minutes later my competitor posts it up, how is the reader supposed to know where the information came out of first? Even though we put time stamps on there, people aren't comparing that. That is difficult. If you're a newspaper and you have a scoop, you have it for a whole day. If you're on-line and you have a scoop, you can have it for five minutes.

Kevin McKenna: Kevin McKenna of the New York Times. I just wanted to respond a little bit to what Dan Gillmor was saying, and I think he was entirely right on about some of the pressures that are inherent in this medium right now which I rather suspect are like a small town newspaper, although I've never worked for one, in that you can't help but be aware if you're a journalist in these operations of what the sources of income are, and who our partners are on the business side, and sometimes on the editorial side. AOL is one on both the editorial and business side. We have an editorial relationships with @home. IBM and Microsoft are our two biggest advertisers, or were when I was still there. And these are all, because of the thrust of our coverage is technology, post very serious issues. I think the description of this as being infinitely gray is apt. It's something we had to be very conscious of and I think have to deal with in terms of full disclosure.

As far as the book review, I just wanted to say that I was involved in that decision, and frankly, I think that it was all a question of how it was executed, i felt, and I think it's been executed in a way that keeps separate what's editorial and what is revenue deriving for the business side. And we were consulted extensively on the editorial side of both the online operation and the newspaper. And we felt that if it was executed in the right way it was clear that no choice of editorial content would be based on anything having to do with the salability of books, which it's certainly not, and that it was essentially a level playing field where everything was available and kept separate in terms of its display, that it passed what we would consider a smell test. But I think there are many cases that would not pass that test and the only, the silver lining I would offer to you, is that the editorial side of the operation was extensively consulted and I hope will be consulted the next time it comes up because we may feel it doesn't pass that test.

Kathleen deLaski: Kevin, is the hyperlinks in the book review, though, they're not in the book review, they're outside of them on the web site, is that right?

Kevin McKenna: The links from our site to Barnes and Noble? They're not within the editorial well, as it were, of a page. They are off in a margin that is meant to specifically reflect that it's not editorial endorsement or content.

Question: I wanted to share with the panel an item that was in the Sacramento Bee recently, there was a TV station in Fresno that sent a mailer to California candidates inviting them to place their photographs and a political statement on their TV station Web site for a price of $300. The TV station Web site -- this is through the marketing department, but the TV station Web site is promoted through the news broadcast. This is the first incident I've heard of, but I'm worried that this could be the beginning of an ugly trend of direct conflict of interest within at least TV media, and I'm just curious what the panel... I believe it's KSEE in Fresno. I'm not sure. But it's Fresno and the Central Valley....

Voice: It's an ugly trend that's here. There are newspapers, for instance, that will not put hyperlinks in their classifieds. There are newspapers, for instance, that have local Web site directories and these are compiled only from advertisers who agree to buy a certain amount of advertising in the print version. The Santa Rosa Press Democrat being one of those, which is a local newspaper owned by the New York Times.

These are not isolated kinds of incidents. These are all over the place. And yes, it is one of those trends that is going to either destroy the credibility or is going to destroy the credibility unless somebody does something about it.

Voice: Can I make a suggestion? We're in a university journalism school here. This is a wonderful opportunity for a journalism school to put up a Web site that keeps track of all of these squirrely activities that people are doing, and you'll get more page views than you would believe. The public would eat this up and you'd have the credibility to do it. So whoever of you are teaching here, think of it for a class project. I would just love to see something like this.

Lewis Perdue: I've already offered to donate WebEthics.com and to host it for free, and to donate some time having once been a journalism...

Voice: Don't limit it to Web ethics -- journalism ethics.

Paul Grabowicz: Louis and I have actually had some conversations about this, and hopefully in the fall maybe some small piece of it would start.

Question: I was just going to make the point that this idea that we can repair or grant credibility to the media is actually an open question in my own mind, just as a journalist. When we say the new media is destroying the credibility of journalism, I say what credibility? Survey after survey comes out that shows that the only people that believe that journalists have credibility is us. I wonder if all of this is going to be able to have an impact on the reader's...

...I think this exercise of discussing it is positive and I don't mean to say that we shouldn't be asking these questions, but just I wonder if the reading public is going to be able to make a difference, even if we make it public what our code of conduct is. They don't believe that we uphold it, so is publishing only asking for more criticism?

Question: I'd like to add one comment. I think it's more important than ever to try to build credibility because with TV and print, people couldn't go straight to the source. In a lot of cases now people can. If they don't trust us, they have no reason to come to our Web sites or to look at our publications. So the eroding trust of media which I think print and TV have contributed to, now it's more important than ever, more dangerous than ever, just because of the Web.

Think about it. On a news story there's no reason why a source who doesn't really want to deal a lot with the hassles of interviews and so forth, say Hillary Clinton, why couldn't she put up her own Web site and put out whatever information she wants and never speak to the press? People could go straight there and hear her side of the story if she doesn't think she's being treated fairly. If people don't trust what the Washington Post and the New York Times and Newsweek write about her, she could just stop talking and have her own Web site.

Voice: That actually happened to us. We wrote a story about Microsoft, and they never contacted us. Not one editor on the staff was contacted that they were disputing facts in the story, but they put up a page on the Microsoft Web site saying the story was wrong. But never bothered to complain to us, to try and retract or correct the story. Although I think the story was right.

Voice: The other area we haven't really pointed to here, which AOL is certainly in the middle of, is interactivity and the credibility of interactivity as journalism. A lot of our Web sites do polls, for instance, and they're always criticized as being non-scientific. I just wanted to point to one quick anecdote, that a lot of our polling we're finding because the samples are so large, they're tracking very much directly with what Gallup is doing scientifically.

We did one on the Paul Jones case being thrown out. We had 100,000 people take the poll and it was (filtered) so you could only vote once, and 100,000 people in a self-selected way came up with the same percentage as Gallup did which in this case was 63 percent favoring the judge's throwing the case out.

Scott Rosenberg: I'm Scott Rosenberg from Salon. We actually link to a book selling partner from Salon, too. I don't think it's necessarily a horrible thing to do, but could you bring up that New York Times page again? I'm a little surprised at how aggressively the New York Times does it, and I wanted to show the page here.

The "buy" button there is kind of set off in a different color, but I would question whether to me, looking at this, whether this is outside of the editorial well. It sure looks to me like it's right dead in the center of the editorial well, and personally, I was a little surprised at how aggressively the New York Times chose to sort of push this partnership, and I'm glad that we brought this up here and maybe people can look and judge for themselves.

Voice: It also has the potential for skewing best seller lists. Read it, buy it, alter the best seller list.

On to Panel 4: The Future of New Media

Back to: The Conference Program

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

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