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Panel 4: The Future of New Media

David Weir, new media consultant, formerly with Hotwired (moderator)
Richard Gingras, @home
Francis Pisani, Le Monde/El Pais
Todd Oppenheimer, Newsweek Interactive
Joey Anuff, Suck.com
Bruce Koon, Mercury Center
Paul Saffo, Institute for the Future

Discussion

David Weir: Now we have the hard core left here, the news junkies. We've packed a lot into our brains today, so welcome back to the future.

This panel, as has been noted, are new media as they exist today -- the Web is about three years old so I figure it's a toddler, and anybody that has a toddler at home knows that it's a time of explosive growth and a lot of interesting mistakes and falling on your face all the time and bumped heads. So a lot of the stuff we've been talking about today really is probably appropriate to the stage of development we're at.

That isn't what this panel is about. We've talked about the beginnings, we've talked about excellence, we've talked about credibility. Now we're going to really just try to open up a little bit and dream a little bit, talk about the future, what this might be, what this might be able to become.

We have a wonderful panel up here of people that can talk about the future, following a straight line from today. Just imagine that line from now going forward.

The first person is Richard Gingras. Richard is the VP of programming and Editor in Chief down at @home, previously at Apple. While he was at Apple, handed a lot of their on-line experiments, and as part of that had the foresight and the courage to squeeze some money out of the corporation and give the initial funding for Salon.

I've asked Richard to show us just a few screen grabs here that might, because those of you, I think everybody in this room is familiar with the idea behind @home, but through cable modem delivery. Here's our first space explorer into broadband, and let's see where they're taking it.

Richard Gingras: Thank you. While I'm flipping this over, when I gave that money to Salon, they shocked me with both their audaciousness and their passion by immediately quitting their jobs at the Examiner. Scared the hell out of me, but they've obviously done wonderful things.

I'm going to talk fast in going through here. The @home network, for those who don't know, offers very high-speed access to the Internet over cable. We have relationships with most of the American major cable operators, are up in some 20-30 markets across the country and I think today just broke 100,000 in terms of our subscribers. It's very, very fast. It's about 100 times faster than 28.8, about 10 times faster than ADSL. It clearly changes the medium, and that's what I would like to share a little bit about today, is how we think it does change the medium.

First things first here, we're going to just quickly pop to the home page. What I create is the on-line experience that our users see every day, and it does have a content layer to it. We, in a sense, I have a staff of editors. We don't do any original news reporting in the news area. We do a lot of rewriting story selection, headlines, building an integrated content experience with information from various sources. We do do some original creation of content in the soft feature areas, but not in hard news.

I hold the same editorial policies in news as we do in shopping and anywhere else on the service. I, for one, don't like the notion that you might have different editorial policies in on-line service in shopping versus news. The user does not understand the difference, and I intend to hold onto that principle as long as I possibly can, and hopefully I won't be playing the role of Steve Chin at next year's conference. (Laughter) I say that with a great deal of respect to Steve Chin and what he tried to do with Channel A.

In our news channel, I have about four key comments I want to make with these few slides. This is our news channel. It's probably Monday morning's edition of it.

One point I want to make here is that we talk about the convergence of media. It is, indeed, happening, particularly in the broad band space. You'll see, one of our objectives throughout with this is trying to bring the whole level of design approach to the on-line medium to a different level. This is not about templated Web sites that you have to do for reasons of low speed on the Internet, but in the broad band space we can make it more impactful, we can use more photos and graphics and big headlines and video and audio to do so. As you can see, we have links. Those red elements might point to an AP story, might point to a New York Times story, might also, for that matter, pop up a video. There are a lot of component parts video to what we do.

So indeed, the convergence of multimedia is indeed possible in the broad band space. It's extremely effective and it's extremely popular. Our news channel on a given day, 20 percent of our daily audience comes into the news channel. That's 10 percent of our subscribers, whether they're on-line or not, come into the news channel, so clearly we're doing something that is working at least in terms of getting the traffic to come on in and work with what we have. But breaking the medium up into its component parts I think is a very interesting point with regard to the evolution of story architecture already.

As you see, for ease of navigation and browsing, we believe strongly in giving people strong, very short pieces at the beginning. Most on-line newspaper sites still look like newspapers. You get a headline and a long story. We tend to go short pieces, go deeper and deeper and deeper.

Ultimately, if we were doing original investigative reporting, I'd like to have select source material there as well.

A key point here that I would make is it's a very different skill set and it's important for journalists, particularly in schools today, to begin to understand how do they collect information with this end result in mind -- not simply the 500 or 1500 word piece which is appearing in a print publication.

Another bid element of on-line is, indeed, video in the broad band space. We're going to see a lot more of this move from what we see on the Web today with text and graphics to video and audio components. It works. It's very popular. On-demand video. When people talk about video on demand, it's really going to be, as I see it, all about short pieces. How can I get the story I want, and I'll touch on that in a moment. They love to pull up those stories and replay them, particularly impactful in areas like sports.

Another key item, what I just showed you is what we're doing in the personal computer space, what appears in a personal computer. Anyone who's looked at a Web TV recognizes that the potential for the Internet via a television set is powerful, and what we're going to see happen in the cable space over the next ten years, I virtually will guarantee you that a majority of American households will have Internet via their TV set in that period of time, and I'll tell you why.

Cable boxes -- the next generation of cable boxes that will be input in households, and they're starting with this in some of our partners at the end of this year, will have Internet capability built in, and they will be given away at no charge because they're basically replacing the existing converter. They may charge you more for full Internet access, but the capability will be there. As you can imagine, that's going to drive penetration, and drive penetration fast.

The other element that we see in the set top space is the convergence of the TV channel and the on-line component. So this is CNN on a set top box, I'm watching the full feed of CNN there, and it's surrounded by their interactive on-line components, so you can begin to see the medium coming together here.

Why is this important? One element is, unfortunately for those of us who come more from the print world, is it's going to advantage the TV programmers to a very, very significant degree because there's obviously a lot of viewership which goes to the TV programming, which will more easily drive deep into the content in the interactive on-line space.

I think the last comment I would say about this as we go forward is in the news area, I think in ten years we will see almost an end to the notion of sort of the temporal narrative news services and channels, seeing an hour of news, and instead go to a service which is entirely driven by what you select so that it's TV programming story by story, along the lines that we saw here.

Thank you.

David Weir: Richard, just one thing quickly. You said a different skill set and I perked up. I just want to know what do you mean we need to teach our students?

Richard Gingras: The point I made about recognizing what the final product is going to be is really important. Again, if you are thinking about just a print piece, most reporters I know, they do all their research and it ends up in a box under their desk maybe, who knows? All they're worried about is what goes into those 500 words.

If you're looking at the output being in this environment then you want A, the reporter to be incredibly computer savvy, know how to database information, know how to when they go get documents, to make sure they get scanned electrical versions of those documents because they may want to put them up as part of the piece on-line. If they do interviews, record those interviews. You may want to take clips and make it part of what you do on-line. So the gathering process, right at its very core, becomes completely computerized and electronic so that you're in the best position to take full advantage.

We talked earlier about the questions about credibility in journalism in general. I think one thing that can be helped by that in this space is thought it might be brief, though it still might be video oriented, the fact that you might do an investigative report and you can afford to put source material there as well, I think might help to reimpose some credibility in what your end conclusion was.

David Weir: Thank you. Well, students, listen up.

Now we will move along. You can see we're speaking very fast here, but Francis, you don't have to. Francis will be in language number three.

I'm very pleased that Francis Pisani is here today. Francis is a technology correspondent for Le Monde. He also is technology correspondent for El Pais in Madrid, and for Reforma in Mexico.

Katherine Fulton mentioned this morning the drivers behind new media and she mentioned globalization. I haven't heard a lot of talk today about globalization and the way that's transforming our media, so I ask you, Francis, to talk about that.

Francis Pisani: Thank you.

Thinking upon Katherine's idea this morning, and because we are in the universe of competition, I would like everybody to close both eyes -- not only one. (Laughter) Then to imagine we are in a monastery on April 23, 1498 and we are clerics and we are trying to discuss about the printing press. So we are dealing with a tool and we are missing something. The world is changing, and the renaissance is happening.

So my whole point here today is that the medium we are talking about is electronic, it's global, and it's interactive, and we have dealt only with the first part of it.

If we want to get an idea of what is going on, I will take an idea from Manuel Castells, a Berkeley professor, about the network society in which he says that the new society is changed by the fact that we have to deal with spaces of flows instead of with spaces of places. I think that's interesting to us for two reasons. Because we find the spaces of flows on the screen, on the display on which we write or produce our stories, and because the world is changing and we have to deal with flows and not places.

On the screen, one thing, to be brief. I really think we will soon have a malleable story. We have been talking about links between fixed stories, which are imposed by the paper, imposed by the movie, imposed by the time of the radio. This is not the case that technology imposes fixed format on the screen, so we will have malleable stories, allowing people to approach the subject with much more freedom. It doesn't mean that being malleable it cannot be accurate and fair or anything like that.

But let's go to the global world. I see two important dimensions. One is talk to the world, and the other is talk about this changing world. About talking to the world, a few examples. Europeans are not much interested in the business side of technology. They are interested in the product side. I am fascinated by the fact that the New York Times had a business section dedicated to new media long ago, and only started circuits last month, at the same time as El Pais is starting (a section) which is about the products mainly, and there was no special coverage of the business dimension of it.

The second, when I write a story in Spanish for El Pais in Madrid, and for Reforma in Mexico, I have to change my words. The Spanish is the same, but in Spain you say "ordenador" and in Mexico you say "computadora" for computer.

The last one, another example about talking to the world is that in the translation you have problems. For instance, the French have chosen to translate channels in television by "chaine" which is chain. So now how do you deal with the new things about the information which is flowing?

I received one mail last week about a young student in Vera Cruz in Mexico asking how he could practice virtual migration doing Web pages for people in the States who would receive more than he would receive in Mexico. I always remember the story about somebody in Kenya discovering that in a village lost in the countryside, people were praying for rain and for information technology. But this is the easy part.

We are talking about people who have access. The real problem is people who have not access. This is the majority. We always say in this kind of surrounding that there is a low cost of entry into emission of information, but the cost of entry into reception of information has never been higher.

Now a report about the world, I am not going to say many things except I would like us to wonder what would coverage of the Bay Area, which would take to account the flows, would be. We take, with small communities I cannot get a subscription to the San Jose Mercury in Oakland. I get information in the East Bay. I get information on Mayor Brown. I don't get information in the relationship between the different places of the Bay Area and between the Bay Area and the rest of the world. The Asian crisis was interesting because there are many Asians in this part of the world, so we had information about Asian countries. It should be a continuous feed, a continuous stream of information.

I will finish by this. Bill Kovach, the curator of the Nieman Foundation, at the end of the first conference about Excellence in Journalism said, "What is journalism? What are journalists? They give maps to people in order to find their way in the real world."

I think that it is good when you have a space of places, not when you have a space of flow. My suggestion is that we should use the metaphor of the GPS -- the global positioning system -- where you don't know on which soil you are putting your foot, but you get a sense of where you are, thanks to the relative position of satellites.

My three satellites to get a sense of what the challenges are in the future are one, the interface, and the changing nature of the display, the malleable story; two, take the world as a space of flows and not a space of places; and three, never forget the huge black hole of people who have no access. If information technology is key, everybody should have access to information technology, and on this we have to invent, because at the last renaissance there were not that many journalists. (Laughter)

David Weir: Thank you, Francis.

There's no limitation of time or space on the Net, but here there is, and they held up times up, and I'm sorry, because each of these presentations could, with great profit, go on at greater length.

Next we go to Todd Oppenheimer, Associate Editor of Newsweek Interactive and author of quite a few, a number of provocative publications about the subject at hand.

You know, Todd, when we were talking about setting up this panel told me he likens what's going on today on the Net to street theater on a crowded sidewalk, so of course I thought of Times Square. That's what we're doing. We're squawking and trying to get attention to our sites. Without reacting to that in any way, if that's where we are today, where are we going?

Todd Oppenheimer: I'm going to have a little bit of a mixed message for everybody. I'm sort of ambivalent about technology and new media because I've done a fair amount of reporting about its downsides, and I've also done a lot of thinking for my job about what its possibilities are. So bear with me for being psychologically confused in my message to you.

I think one of the things of everything we've heard today is there's general agreement that the issue is not what should new media do. The issue is what should "the" media do. In some ways, a lot of our struggle in new media is to make up for things that the old media has been failing to do, so we need to sort of reinvigorate the vitality and need of what the news business delivers to people in general.

I think that's one of the reasons we heard two questions about what are we doing for minorities and the disenfranchised people? Why are we not covering them? I think this speaks out of the fact that people are feeling like the news business is not speaking directly to their lives, is not giving them information that is vital and that is helpful in some kind of organic and live and absolutely necessary way.

I think that new media can do that. Let me give you my main thing on this. My main hunch about new media and the reason that it has not progressed very slowly... If you look back five years at predictions that were made about new media, and they were starting in the early '90s. Interactive television was supposed to be here by I think '95 or '96. There's any number of... And Paul Saffo, I hope, can probably, since he is a professional futurist, can probably spend his whole talk listing them.

It has stalled in ways that the creators of it didn't anticipate. I think that one of the main reasons is that the main new media organizations, news organizations, have misread what the medium is, what the audience is, and what the activity of engaging in electronic media is all about. I'm going to be a little bit attacking here, but I think that some of the presentations we heard today, particularly from Salon Magazine, proved that. I was absolutely stunned to hear that an editor of Salon Magazine, supposedly one of the leaders, say there's no real difference. It's good stories. We like them or we don't like them. We edit them, fix them up and publish them.

That's crazy. That's like saying that doing a story for the newspaper is the same as doing a story for television. This is a whole new medium. And back to the street theater business, I get this idea because I used to be in the theater and I actually used to do mime on the streets.

Voice: Do some now! (Laughter)

Todd Oppenheimer: The experience of trying to hold an audience on the street is as different from performing on the stage as you can believe. You've got to work so hard. That crowd is so restless. It's not out there to just watch something that's cute. It's out there doing something. if you don't catch them, you lose them. It's the same thing on-line. It strikes me as street journalism.

So in my mind the Internet is not about reading, it's about doing. That's the misread. If you think that we can just write nice stories and publish them on the Internet and have this medium grow, forget about it.

As an example, look at some of the things that have been popular in this computer craze. Let's take the news business out of it. Just in the last few years it's been things like Mist, which is a game on CD-ROM. It's frustrating, but a fascinating sort of CD-ROM treasure hunt, and I think it's something we could imitate.

So let me mention the two things that I think fall into this category. One is a whole new kind of storytelling that's close to what Richard was saying with @home. There's a possibility, especially with big projects, and the San Jose Mercury News did this somewhat with their CIA crack investigation. It had reporting problems, but as a piece of work, it had possibilities.

To create a kind of intellectual puzzle, a treasure hunt, in a sense, a news treasure hunt with some action to it that you've got to actually find your way through these threads, and some suspense of where you're going to go and how the readers will assemble this information. We need to use the technology to create places where as people get lost they come back and see the other threads they can follow and why you as a reporter chose these various threads, and the ways you weighed the various bits of information and the benefits of pursuing this lead versus that lead. And it can become a puzzle for them.

The second thing is as an information exploration which is becoming more and more critical as there's more stuff on Amazon and all these other aggregators.

That leads to something I think is really important, and that is actually helping people solve problems in their lives. I'm not talking about activist journalism where you go out and you see a problem and you decide well, water pollution must be solved in some certain way. I'm talking about giving people a variety of information so that they can solve the problem or their community can solve the problem in the way that they want to. There's a lot of attention these days in print journalism, it's called public journalism or civic journalism. It has great possibilities on-line. It has expanded possibilities of giving people information on towns or states that have made progress on say gangs or pollution or hopelessness or whatever. Contacts of agencies and so on. I think that some of the terms that were mentioned earlier today that I found interesting about having new roles as say facilitators or navigators or filters or even judges, these come up and they become relevant if we decide that we can, that we have a greater role in helping people navigate their way through the morass of stuff in life.

A last point, I'll be very quick. I also think we need to stop just a minute, cool our heels, and say are we pushing this technology on society a lot more than is responsible? A lot more than even the readers want?

There is a myopia, a disconnect, I think, between us, the writers who cover this stuff who are kind of into it, and our sources who are very into it, and the general public. Maybe it's because I report on the downsides of technology, but I see a backlash brewing out there and it's hot. A backlash against technology in schools, in the workplace, in our family lives. If we don't cool the hype a little bit and start thinking about where's the proper role of technology in life, in news, and where are the places where people should be moved off of the computer and sent back into the world, and into contact with real people and real things? We're going to miss again. We're going to be seen as obsolete and unaware of what our readers are really at.

Thanks.

David Weir: Now I want you to visit my class and do mime! (Laughter)

We're going to move along to Joey Anuff. Joey is the co-founder of Suck.com and writes a net surf column on HotWired. I had the pleasure of having Joey among the people on the content side of Wired Digital. You know, Joey is the only person that could ever send me an e-mail and say, "David, your management style sucks," and I wasn't sure, maybe it was a compliment. (Laughter)

Anyway, I would never presume to tell Joey what to say. Joey?

Joey Anuff: I wish you'd just skipped the intro entirely. I could have just riffed straight off of Todd.

Talking about the backlash, I think the backlash has been around forever. I wouldn't sorry about the backlash because when we started this site four years ago it was directly in response to the backlash. I'd read one too many articles in a magazine talking about how the computer really wasn't going to feed the poor, it wasn't going to perform these miracles, and we thought if we're going to critique this thing, let's start this thing and see what it can do and do it from the context of the Web, which is either really wrong headed or just a tiny bit smart.

I've been listening to everything. One of the directives we had while we were here is to listen to everything that had been said before and try to see what that suggested for the future. I've listened to several conversations about credibility. At least every once for panel we've had Matt Drudge be brought up, and I sort of suspect that we might be learning some of the wrong lessons from Matt Drudge. The people in this room might be reading Matt Drudge in a profoundly different way than the people who read Matt Drudge to read Matt Drudge. (Laughter)

One observation. It seems to me as a media consumer, that Matt Drudge is actually more responsible than the traditional media. If you look at Matt Drudge, he had pretty outrageous stories, but he reported them first and he reported them once. The rest of the media ran the same outrageous stories and they did them forever. We're still hearing about them.

So it's sort of odd to call Matt Drudge to the mat for that, seeing as most of the people who were reporting on the stories first heard about it from Matt Drudge, and I bet you about half the people here subscribe to Matt Drudge, including me. I love Matt Drudge.

One of the interesting things about him, though, and he's not alone in this, is he hasn't so much managed to engineer success for himself as he's become sort of the receptacle for success. Matt Drudge is not about one person telling you anything. Matt Drudge is about a network of sources. This ties in sort of nicely with the point Jack Schaefer had asked of Dale Peskin from Dallas Morning News when they were talking about the Monica story. He said well, were these sources X and Y. Dale said, well, there's a small network of information sources. We all know who they are. Well, that's the thing. That's not going to get you a lot of credibility. That's been going on on TV, everywhere, just this assumption that trust us, we know who it is. We can't say, but we'll just put the correct spin.

Now Matt Drudge is letting people into this network of information . You know that Matt Drudge's sources are the White House, the enemies of the White House, the pundits who spin on the White House, everybody who's a player reads Matt Drudge. If he writes something and he's mistaken, he sends out corrections two hours later. That is a very high quality... You can get lost in these questions of whether it's credible or not, but most people out there are intelligent enough to know that whether it's just a rumor or whether it is true -- and a lot of stuff he prints does turn out to be true -- there's something going on. It's live. You could send something to him if you knew about the situation, correct him, and he'd send it out again. And the people who do know about the situation are going to send him the information. If it contradicts what he's printed, he is going to put that out. That's really exciting.

He's not the only one. What he's done... The point, to sum up here, is that he's created this little network. Lots of people are entertained, are informed by being part of this network. He's not the only one.

You look at somebody like Harry Knolls. Harry Knolls covers just the film community. Harry Knolls on "Ain't it Cool, News" features perhaps the worst writing you'll be able to find anywhere. It's comical. It's the equivalent of crayons on the refrigerator. But what he's got there are reviews of movies that aren't going to be out for like six months, because everybody in the industry sends him the reviews based on the very rough cuts. That means something. You want to read that. You're going to forgive some style to get that information. And everybody who reads him, who's part of that industry, knows, send to Knolls when you've got something to say.

The same thing is happening with Salon right now. You know that if you want to get out a story that targets the vast right wing conspiracy, they're a very good source. You either be a source to them, give them a tip of a story, in two days you're going to be on Geraldo. It's simple arithmetic here. (Laughter)

People who manage to become part of this critical mass media in the next couple of years are going to find themselves very successful and very able to leverage their success into different medias, like Matt Drudge does with Fox. Unfortunately, it's very difficult to get to that point. It sort of just happens to you. That's why I sort of feel like everybody here could sort of do one of those look to the left, look to the right. One of these people is going to lose someone half a million bucks because you can't really choose yourself to be a success, but there are going to be a lot of successes like this.

David Weir: Thank you, Joey.

Joey makes a very good point. Whenever you try to send journalists out to do things, they don't just work the top of the organization. Go into the middle, grab sources from the secretaries and the people doing the work in the middle. I think that's one thing Matt Drudge does do. He connects to people in the middle or organizations all over the place, and whatever else you might say about him, from a methodological point of view, as a reporter, it's something to think about.

Our next speaker, Bruce Koon, was supposed to be on an earlier panel and he had to change his schedule, so I'm really happy because he's on our panel now. When Jon Carroll was mentioning earlier today about the first little band of people from the Examiner that did what they did back in '89, I think, what popped into my mind was the next band of them, those guys, during I think the strike in '94, '95 at the newspapers. I was at KQED at the time and watched with admiration, and there are others in the room here that were part of that small team, who went out and showed what journalism on-line could do for our community when the newspapers didn't show up. Bruce is now the ME of the Merc Center. We didn't really get a chance to plan what he was going to say because he wasn't going to be on the panel, so I'm just going to let him tell you.

Bruce Koon: That's a great thing. It puts me at three disadvantages because David asked us to listen to what went on today and not repeat anything, so that's going to be one difficulty. I've been listening very, very quickly.

Secondly, the other disadvantage is I spent all day today in the traditional media. The reason I couldn't make it this morning is that we're doing a reexamination of Mercury Center's position in new media, a hot topic.

You have to understand, I'm coming from a perspective of the traditional medium that has been accustomed to dominating a local marketplace. We've been accustomed to dictating these kinds of questions and issues and wondering what all this new fuss is about. But the fact of the matter is, newspapers are facing declining readership, they're facing new competition for advertising dollars, and so there's a lot of this hand wringing that's going on now because we see the death knoll coming, and along with that traditional good, solid, credible journalism that might be out there.

So there's a shift of [power] that's going on that I'm hearing being talked about here, and that's probably all very, very legitimate. But it puts me at another disadvantage because it's very hard to think about the future when you're being asked every day to justify your hit counts and your page impressions and what kinds of things you're doing.

But what was very heartening this morning as I sat in a darkened room and they were throwing new numbers out at me was a surprise. Because I'd been looking at Yahoo and I'd been looking at all the new threats of the new media coming out at us, and we had some shocking numbers. The fact was that news was still a driver. We keep talking about the fact that there are five drivers doing the Internet. People go on the Internet to search, they go to use directories, they go to do e-commerce, and they go to form communities. These are things that newspapers may or may not have had a good hand on. But news, whatever that beast is, still was a very important component. I couldn't help but as we were flashing up on the screen different Web sites like this, suddenly the fact that James Earl Ray had died, and everyone sort of stopped. We had that same visceral reaction we always have when news happens.

So I'm not sure what form it's going to take, but I know we're going to be here in some way. So what we've done in trying to predict the future at the Mercury News, at least, is to start with what we know best. That's news gathering. I agree with everyone here, though, we have to start stretching those boundaries. Because the fact of the matter is, it might not be print, it might not be text, but there will still be quality to it, there will still be a lot of the basic rules, whether it's video, audio, or these multi-layered... I've yet to see one of these stories, and I'm anxious to see one of these stories that helps the reader have mystery and find a way through.

Personally, I don't have enough time to do that. I want my news quickly, and then I want to know where I can come back to that. So we've done something at the Mercury News where we've actually integrated the newsroom -- unlike the Chicago Tribune, the New York Times, other places that have taken the philosophy of setting up a separate unit. We've decided the journalists in our newsroom have to help define the future. That means they have to start learning well what does it mean to start writing on different multiple deadlines and answer some of the questions that were raised here. Does it mean the quality of the journalism you're doing is deteriorating? What does it mean if we ask you to start thinking, as has been suggested here, of not just about 500 words in a two-dimensional box, but we're not going to send you out with cameras, we're not going to send you out with radio microphones, but what happens if you start asking well, maybe there are other forms in which the information should be coming out, and can I do that? Can I bring a database back? I'm appalled by the fact that most, many reporters are still not very computer savvy because these are tools. These are tools for gathering information to help make you a better reporter, and the fact that you don't know how to do a spreadsheet or how to start deciphering and analyzing information yourself, rather than taking the word of some bureaucrat which is how reporters do it, we now have the power and the ability to do something beyond that.

So looking ahead, what (inaudible) might give you a heads up to the future? So far the fact of the matter is what's been successful for us and I hope holds for the future are some basic things. Good writing. Again, I'll expand it. Good video, good radio. I don't know those tools. We've been starting to learn video and someone pointed out the last thing we should do is go to the TV station to learn video. They said go get some art students or some documentary workers. They pointed out that video on television is really filling space and that might not be the most compelling stuff possible.

So we've had some success with Good Morning Silicon Valley -- a simple concept. A smart editor reporting, deciphering, doing critical choices about content, and then offering you that as a starting point for your day and then sending you off. Dark Alliance was mentioned. You're absolutely right. Dark Alliance had some flaws with the reporting, some basic problems, but in that reporting piece we were able to offer documentation, we were able to offer sound, video, new ways to explore.

So what do I see in the future? Very quickly, I think that bad journalism will continue to be bad journalism in new forms; and we'll see it in all kinds of new forms. We're seeing it today. But I think the opportunity for doing what we do really well can be so much more grand than we're beginning to see and that's the exploration and why I'm looking for new journalists or other journalists who have sort of pushed the boundary. I don't think we've even become close to finding out what the new media can do. I do think speed will be of an essence. I read Matt Drudge, too. I think that you'll need to do teamwork, that you'll need to see a broader viewpoint of how news....

The fact that there are some newsrooms again, real quickly, print newsrooms that don't even have a television on, and then wonder why they miss a story. I said you know, it's a multimedia environment now. Start getting into it.

David Weir: Thanks, Bruce.

Three quick things. Dark Alliance, there was a real attempt to make transparent the documents and the sources, wasn't that right? The original intent was actually to make it visible.

Bruce Koon: Yeah.

David Weir: I think that's an interesting point not to miss.

Two, are you saying we have to teach our students how to use a spreadsheet?

Bruce Koon: Yeah, I am saying that.

David Weir: Okay. Three, does anyone know, is James Earl Ray still dead? (Laughter) That's a really bad joke. Sorry for that.

Enough of journalists. Now we're going to go to somebody who probably doesn't call himself that, Paul Saffo. When I tracked down Paul to try to convince him to come which I'm very pleased succeeded, it was via Wildfire. It was interesting, it was my first experience to get into a phone situation and try to track somebody down that way and almost feel the... It was just a different feeling of finding him, I must say, to be talked to as the nice voice was locating him.

Paul is the Director for the Institute for the Future. The other thing about Paul is, I thought maybe I'd do a little investigative reporting. What could be more of a setup that somebody who talks about the future, does predictions. Some will be wrong. So I tried to find some, and I asked him about it at lunch because I couldn't find anything he was wrong about. He said something like the future tense is a cautious language, and we hedge our bets.

You don't have to hedge your bets here, Paul. Thank you for coming.

Paul Saffo: ...random. I picked them because of comments made earlier in the day, and also because I think they might be interesting and possibly practical to you all.

First, just the observation, I think today for all the neat new stuff happening with new media, we are, for the most part, still in the Bakelite phase of new media. Those of you who read history will recall when the first plastic was invented, Bakelite, we spent our whole time trying to make it look like wood and tortoise shell until eventually someone woke up and said you know, it makes pretty crappy wood and tortoise shell. Let's let plastic be plastic. Then it took off as a physical medium of expression. I feel like we're just beginning to reach escape velocity with new media in terms of there have already been a couple of leading edge innovations, but the innovation really has not yet begun. For the most part we've been paving the cow paths, doing old things in a slightly new medium.

A couple of things I think to look for, and these are not like my top four or anything, they're just things to look for. One is over the next two years we're going to see people going back to create new print-based media forms. There is a lot of life left in paper, and I think we're teetering right on the edge of seeing new forms of paper-based literature that will leverage new forms of ways of putting ink on paper, the distribution leverage of things like reader orientation of Amazon.com and Selecting Finding. I think it will be a renaissance for people who would like to publish their novels. You'll see lots of surprises there, and it's going to hit news as well.

The second thing on the less optimistic side, I recommend that you all go back and read a book by John Brunner titled "The Shock Wave Rider". It was published in 1978. In it he describes something called the Delphi Pool. Now out of curiosity, how many people recall that in this room? A couple of hands. Okay.

For those of you who didn't, what it was is it was kind of the lottery meets the newspaper meets government policy. The pool would, a breaking event would happen, Chernobyl would go off, so they would put up as a question in public is this going to crater Ukraine and make it uninhabitable for the next 10,000 years? You could offer your opinion, and you paid to offer your opinion, and if you were right, you won the lottery, and the government watched the opinion polling, because what better opinion to judge than people actually paying money to express their opinion.

I have this really uneasy feeling that we haven't even begun to see the bottom of the dark and seamy side of news meets public opinion and public pandering, and we may look back at Matt Drudge as the Lowell Thomas of his age by comparison. (Laughter)

In terms of where it's going to affect the lives of journalists, how many people here have their own personal Web page? A few. You are probably going to have private Web pages fairly soon. Think of a Web page as a private research tool, something only you consult. It's all your research notes and all linked together. You might share it with close friends, but it becomes, bookmarks on steroids becomes a very powerful reporter's notebook. Now I don't think much of the Web and I don't think much of html. I have the same attitude as Ted Nelson who says that trying to fix html would be like trying to graft arms and legs onto hamburger. (Laughter)

But that said, this environment, learning to use this tool as a reporter's tool, as your notebook, I think is going to be a very, very important thing for you all to do.

Last of all, pay attention to the present tense. I think we live in an age of news storms where all of a sudden out of nowhere things come up and sweep over us like a force five hurricane, and all everybody can do is grab a tree or run for cover and tell their friends about it.

But I think it's a period of acceleration to a new plateau where things will settle down. We've had these events before, and even though the wind is blowing like mad, it will calm down a little bit, we'll be able to make sense of it, and it's important to keep in mind that even in the middle of a rippingly high storm with winds blowing everywhere that as Will and Ariel Durant once observed, "The winds are always on the side of the ablest navigators." So wherever it blows us, I can guarantee we'll end up somewhere interesting that we will probably like very much.

David Weir: Thank you, Paul. I heard a prediction in there. I wrote it down. (Laughter)

This has been an incredibly wonderful compressed panel, and we're going to go now straight to you. The rest of the time we have, we want it to be interactive, want to hear the questions.

Question: Two brief things. First of all, it was not the Examiner that did the earthquake coverage, it was The Well. I might as well mention that once today. Secondly, it's Grassy Knoll, Death Knell. (Laughter) Third, I think I agree with Joey insofar as I was able to understand what he had to say... (Laughter) ...in that a lot of what was happening on the last panel, and to a lesser extent on this panel, neglected to take into account how sophisticated the audience is and how much the audience has already learned about absorbing and evaluating media. The audience is teaching itself how to figure out where in the spectrum of reliability Matt Drudge lies, and where in the spectrum of reliability Kenneth Starr lies. In every way the audience, that's why I was saying this morning and suggesting that the more you can take advantage of the interactivity that is built into this technology, the more you can ask your readers to interact with you and tell you what they know and what they have discovered and what they have seen, the closer you're going to get to a legitimately new form of media.

Bruce Koon: That's part of what I was referring to this morning. The metrics are terrible. We talk about knowing what our users and people are up to. We're just starting to collect the data and the ability to have that kind of interaction. Some of the numbers I was looking at this morning, it's the first time in two years that I've been doing this job that I saw numbers that were telling me something about my audience and testing my assumptions for the first time, and saying Bruce, you've been completely wrong about this. And the fact is, it turned out that for example our audience does want to know more about international news and we have an Asia report, for example, and the numbers were much higher than I would have imagined given other predilections or the tone of the feedback that comes through e-mail.

So I think you're right on that, that we're finally getting some feedback that will help us not pander, but at least help make some decisions, or at least understand what people are doing.

Joey Anuff: I'd just like to throw in a word in favor of pandering. What exactly is the big problem...

David Weir: Thank you, Joey. Thanks for that word. I'm not your boss anymore, but...

Question: I have a question about convergence, and when television becomes more of a mass consumer product on the Web or on the Internet, playing off a little bit of what you said, Richard, and I see this with our television partners through AOL. They're sort of chomping at the bit waiting for their moment in the sun when they really have the upper hand because, let's face it, once you can sit passively in front of your television set, in front of your box, whatever the box is, and watch something instead of having to work with your mouse and work hard at reading a story, does television have the upper hand? In the earlier panels a lot of the people that were complaining about what was wrong with media currently were complaints about television. So does some of the great stuff that's getting done in print now, and that we're talking about getting done in the future, does that get pushed aside because the mass audience is really just going to want to watch the Web once the produce moves more quickly and more reliably?

Joey Anuff: I have a thought on what is going on right now that's contributing to TV having the upper hand over print. This is a problem, it kills me. It kills me daily. Every time we write a column we like to weave some context with hypertext. We're on the Web. It's supposed to be about links, so we want to link to places and we want to sort of talk about what's in the current, in the news, current events.

It exists right now that all of the news sources, most of which are represented here today, exist in their own vacuum. We can't link to them. They don't have permanent URLs. If you want to go to the New York Times on the plan that they announced a few months ago, it actually would cost you more to read a review of a film that came out a year ago than to rent that film at your local video store. (Laughter) That's not going to work. That doesn't enhance the Web's value as a context building medium.

Now if the New York Times, for example, were to go ahead and open up their archives, not just three, but 10 years, 20, years, 30 years into the past, they would be as big as Yahoo. If they could put a front end that was useable there, that would be rich, unbelievable history. Nobody is even considering that. People are talking about whether they should charge 75 cents or a dollar. Nobody's saying let's go and take our archives and put them up there. If you do that, you have a resource that's pretty phenomenal.

Now TV is never... It's going to take forever for TV to be able to come up with that sort of system, to be able to match the ability to link deep into context, into footnotes. But if we don't have that in print, if print is closed off, it doesn't matter.

Richard Gingras: Let me touch on that for a second.

When I look at that, I look at it more as an opportunity. Yes, as I said, I do think video as a media type becomes a very, very strong player. I can't deny it. But I think there's an opportunity there. For one thing, the very nature of the fact that you will have that remote control in your hand and be able to navigate through other types of things I think is somewhat irresistible, but you can't navigate through video, and no one's figured out a way to do that. Maybe 10, 20 years from now, who knows. But you can't navigate through video. You largely navigate through text and get to video in an interactive environment.

So my point earlier about story architecture, it wasn't about playing mystery games. I don't buy that. I'm not trying to play games with stories. It was really, quite frankly, as simple as, I thought of this earlier. To quote Nathan Hale, "Give me brevity and give me depth." Give me the brevity for navigation, and give me the opportunity to go deep, and I think you can do that through the TV, if you'd like. So I think the opportunity is there to work with the medium that way. But it really causes us, when you get to that point...

Now no one online, and I understand this today, we can't afford to invest a lot in creating the content we create. That will change as the numbers go up. My point being, though, you've got to start creating material at some point that truly is molded to the capabilities of this medium, and that really is not yet happening on the Web today.

Francis Pisani: I would like to pick up on the mystery games. I don't know if it is the answer, but I feel there is something very important to that. One of the first things is most of us are over 25 here, and the new generation has been created in a world in which the reference is the game and the electronic game, and we are not addressing them. We have been raised in a world in which the reference was the novel or the film which both are fixed. My attention was caught when I realized that the Marine Corps to train its new recruits have used Quake, which is one of the most violent and best known games on the Web. Because they realized that that was what the young kids understood.

I think that we should not ignore that. The new generation has been created in a different world, and interactivity means a different thing to them.

Voice: Actually it was Doom, not Quake.

Francis Pisani: Thank you. Quake is the other one. There are two things now.

Question: It seems to me that there shouldn't be any discussion, like a division between print, video, sound. What we have in the advantage of this medium is bringing all these elements to bear, to get to really what we want as journalists which is to bring the truth of the matter to the people who really need it as quickly as we can, and do it consistently, day after day. That is to say when we get a story like the El Nino storms that hit us this winter, we need Doppler radar live. We need it because our people need it. We need video and sound to bring the truth of the matter to the most number of people who need it. We need text to form the basis and give it the depth that it needs to have.

The TV people, at least the ones I deal with, are very aware of the shortcomings of television, and the people who have even a modicum of vision love the idea that they can now rest some of their reporting on a bedrock of text. The text people love the idea that they can get onto a Web and get the immediacy and the truth-telling of video.

So it seems to me that really we're talking about a true convergence -- don't divide them up into TV does this and radio... We're talking about plastic. We're talking about our own medium now. We've got the tools to use those immediately.

Question: My name is Lisa Nishimoto. I'm a first year student at the school.

We have the unique opportunity of just entering the field of journalism during this time of change. My question to the panel, Mr. Gingras touched on this briefly, is what can we do right now to prepare ourselves for a journalism landscape that contains new media?

Todd Oppenheimer: I want to answer that because I feel strongly about this one, and it partly comes from doing a lot of reporting about electronic media in schools. And I think we heard it even from some of the panelists here.

The most important thing to prepare for are your intellectual skills. This technology is going to change so damn fast, if you spend a bunch of time learning some multimedia design or html or whatever, by the time you get on the job market it's going to be obsolete, so don't bother. They're going to teach you what you need to know anyway in a few months. I mean maybe roughly know how to use a computer, but that's about it.

The other things are so complicated. Having a sense of how to handle conflicting information -- not from two sides, that's another sort of old media paradigm. We no longer deal in a world with two sides and two sets of truths. Multiple sides, multiple truths. Today's world is one where in the university they talk about deconstructionism where there is not even "a" truth. So learning how to deal with that kind of complexity and multiple points of view and multiple facts.

By the same token, I think once you go out to get your first job, I don't know that it matters... The old rule of thumb used to be go work on a small paper, which I still think has a lot of merit to it if the editor there is at all smart, because you have to deal with the grit of your community and meet the people you cover and write about in a way that you don't either on big publications or I think sometimes in electronic forms. It's good for you. But even if you work for a small media firm, make sure that they really understand journalism and understand what is it to sort truth and to sort out the line of a story and a line of reasoning and writing and editing and rewriting, and how you make a narrative. Those are the kinds of things that will hold up, that will not be obsolete in ten years.

Francis Pisani: I think you should try, and maybe you are trilingual or quadrilingual because we are, all this meeting has been focusing on the U.S., and there cannot be excellence only for the U.S. if you are on the Web. And if you are on the Web you have to... If you want to cover El Nino, what is the Peruvian press saying about El Nino? There may be something interesting in that. So I think it's key, and I'm fascinated by a site I love which is the New York Times, the site closes itself to the rest of the world by asking for a subscription, so they can pretend to be excellent for New York or for the U.S. And still it is the medium with maybe CNN, we can discuss a long time about that, which is a reference in many, many, or could be a reference in many places. So you should be tri or quadrilingual, and you should look for your information not only for quotes inside the U.S., for quotes outside the U.S. and so on.

Paul Saffo: I'll just qualify Todd's comments about ignoring the technology. it's very important not to get bewitched by the technology or an html with the belief that it's going to last more than a couple of years, but the surest and fastest road to middle aged cluelessness is to keep your hands off of this stuff. Everybody should use the tools that are available to them. Echoing what I said earlier, the Web right now is ground zero. It's the eye of the hurricane of what's going on. Students have a wonderful opportunity that we're all jealous of, that you can actually use school as a license for obsession. (Laughter) So roll up your sleeves, dig into this stuff. Sometimes you learn a technology only in order to dismiss it, but I'll bet you every single person in this room at some point in their career got deep into the technical aspect of some emerging medium, be it video, be it the details of print or page layout and the like, and even though they don't do it anymore, that experience still informs their sense of esthetics and judgment. And besides, let's be practical here. I'm sure you all make a decent salary, but you're underpaid professionals. If you can code html and you can sign your name without drooling, I can guarantee you within 24 hours you'll get a job at at least $120,000 a year. So it's great job security.

Todd Oppenheimer: I just want to add briefly, I am consciously exaggerating to make a point because I feel the pressure is so much the other way. I think Paul is largely right. But just be careful.

David Weir: This technology is the staircase to the future. This is a journalism school, and this gets to the core of why we have this conference. Besides our will to participate in the search for excellence in journalism is how can we teach our students in this new environment. That's why I'm so happy the question got raised. We have a number of our students here.

Question: I just have a comment. When I taught here a year ago one of the things that interested the students was how does the world of business work. One of the choices they're facing was there might not be a job when they got out of the school here, no matter how well qualified. One of the opportunities that could be suggested and trained for is how to create your own job or to start something on your own. It's a tradition -- I.F. Stone's weekly. He ran his own paper. Well regarded, ran on subscription. No one's mentioned that, that sort of anti-dated the Web. But instead of the traditional model of going out and waiting for somebody to give you a job, sometimes the thing to do is you have to create one. In a way, that's what David Talbot did by starting Salon.

Voice: Actually, I would encourage you not to believe that you can learn html and earn $120,000 because the truth of the matter is you can learn html in three days. You should actually probably limit yourself, spend three days learning html, and then decide you've learned enough html. Just publish. It's super easy.

Question: I have a comment about something that was said earlier that I wanted to bring up again. Someone was talking about having a place in your media access point for the readers to have access to each other. I want to amplify that again and see if anyone on this panel has any comment on it. It's not so much a question of do the readers or the audience have the ability now to go to the sources that we go to and that we are the filter for, but our being aware that we are members of a community of which our readers are apart, and that we are on some level equal, that we can join in a chat room with our readers and discuss our story and our viewpoints and their viewpoints, and that this medium gives them an opportunity to access themselves.

The common paradigm was the telephone. When people picked up a telephone they thought they would hear an opera singer, or on Sundays they'd hear a sermon, until people who made the phone company discovered that people liked communicating, and that this media gives people news about themselves.

David Weir: Thank you, Gary. Good point.

Voice: I'll just make one brief comment on that, not to dwell too much on the areas of interactivity (inaudible). But we all love to talk about that, having people post their opinions and so on. I find too often it's not done very well and you end up with these large reams of crap that no one wants to go through. Which isn't to say not do it. You've got to manage it if you're going to do it.

One interesting thing that I've found is, I had my editors basically commit to doing at least one weekly chat with their audience. Whatever section they're responsible on. Get their audience to come and talk to them. Simply because I think it's always good for them to hear what people have to say and have to answer them directly, right then and there. How did they respond to what news we're playing and how we're playing it? I think that's really useful. It's certainly much different from the very much arms length relationship we have in traditional media.

Voice: I think chat is just insane. As a writer, that's the last thing in the world I'd ever want to do, go into a chat. I would draw the line at chat, but e-mail is another issue entirely. You can really stimulate a huge response of e-mail. We don't ask our writers to respond to all the e-mail out there. I think that is probably the top sort of boundary of what I would expect, is if somebody writes you something that's particularly profound or perceptive or confrontational. If you think there's sort of entertainment in it, go ahead and write back. It's great PR, but it's a little bit overrated as a revolution.

Voice: The point is giving the editor the opportunity and the responsibility to have a dialogue with the audience. You're right, it's fine to invite e-mail and we have all kinds of e-mail feedback, but the problem is you can't handle it. It doesn't all get responded, and it just all goes in the waste bin. I find it's not fair to the reader.

Voice: If I heard the observation right, he was talking about readers talking with each other, not talking with editors. That's a whole different ball of wax.

Question: This was actually back on the question of training for journalists. I want to read courses in a curriculum. Information, organization and retrieval; information, users and society; cognitive approaches to information; management of information systems; economics of information; intellectual property; presentation of information; print literacy and power in America. This a curriculum at Berkeley, it's in the School of Information Management and Systems, which used to be the Library School. I would like to suggest that, again, there are disciplines outside of our own that would give us a lot of the tools we're going to need, and indeed the transformation that's going on in terms of the Library School might be what we're looking at in terms of journalism down the road.

David Weir: Okay. I think this panel is concluded. We're going to segue straight into our wrap-up now.

Voice: Without needing to change any of the arrangements, I'd just like to turn to Orville and Tom to get your wrap-up.

On to Closing Remarks

Back to: The Conference Program

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