One of the dreams of the Internet was that it would allow almost anyone to become a publisher. It's debatable whether or not that dream will ever be meaningfully realized, but it certainly seems that anyone who ever wanted to be a media critic can now do it easily online.
There are hundreds, and probably thousands of sites on the Internet that republish mainstream media snippets, often with comment and analysis. The better known Webzines, such as Slate and Salon, approach the task with familiar professionalism reminiscent of print media, but a wide variety of more obscure sites offer individual takes on media coverage that range from crude to erudite.
Why has media criticism flourished online? In part, it's because magazines of media criticism -- notably this one and the American Journalism Review -- have not been especially aggressive in their approach to the Web. It's difficult to find even the complete contents of either magazine on their respective Web sites, and neither produces much content original to the Web. The newer Brill's Content does offer some Web-only material, but it, too, treats the Web site as secondary to the magazine. (This reflects the old-media fear that free, online offerings will dilute paid, real-world circulation.)
Secondly, the Web has helped bring many traditional media analysts to a wider audience. This includes not only mainstream critics, such as The Washington Post's Howard Kurtz, but also organizations that devote themselves to media analysis. Chief among these are the ones that come at the press through a particular ideological lens -- such as the right-wing Media Research Center and the left-wing Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR). For those groups, the Web distributes their critiques more widely and quickly than their newsletters ever could; their fans can quickly repackage material on their own sites by linking to them.
There has also been a proliferation of media reporting and criticism that exists solely on the Net. Both Slate and Salon are saturated with media-focused stories and tidbits; some, like Timothy Noah's Chatterbox, exhibit an arch playfulness that is difficult to achieve in print. But true junkies turn to the site run by Jim Romenesko: MediaNews (formerly known as MediaGossip). The site takes advantage of one of the Web's great strengths: external links. In fact, the site -- which links to dozens of mainstream and alternative media sources -- is almost exclusively an aggregation of material that appears elsewhere. In a kind of aw-shucks purism, Romenesko declines even to discuss how many readers he has; "numbers don't matter to me," he says. But his success at reaching the niche of America's media elite allowed him last summer to quit his day job at the St. Paul Pioneer Press and produce a slightly slicker version of MediaGossip, MediaNews, on behalf of the Poynter Institute.
One tremendous advantage online media critics enjoy is timeliness. The all-too-familiar nightmare of the magazine media writer or critic is to work for several days on a story or item, only to see it end up in a daily newspaper the day of your deadline.
On the Internet, as soon as you're ready to publish, you can publish. When most Web sites are working at maximum capacity, their editing-to-publishing cycle is usually a matter of minutes. "You never have to worry about being scooped," says Susan Lehman, who edited and wrote media stories for Salon.com for three and a half years. Despite that advantage, there are comparatively few sites with paid staff dedicated to reporting original media analysis and criticism. One that does is the Online Journalism Review (www. ojr.org), which is affiliated with the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California. OJR was launched in March 1998 and features regular commentary from veteran newsman Robert Scheer. The site publishes between three and five news stories a month, and has a small audience by Web standards: under 100,000 page views a month. OJR managing editor Joshua Fouts says that his site distinguishes itself from its print competitors because it's the Net writing about the Net: "We focus exclusively on the global development of online journalism -- journalism which uses the Internet as its delivery system," Fouts says.
It's significant that none of the Web-specific media reporting and criticism sites stands alone as a business; OJR is nonprofit, and Romenesko's sites have thrived only because he has spent thousands of unpaid hours building and updating them. This spring, a New York-based Web outfit called Powerful Media plans to launch a news site devoted to original reporting and commentary on the media, entertainment, publishing, and Internet businesses. Headed by former New York editor Kurt Andersen and former Spin editor Michael Hirschorn, the site has already attracted millions of dollars in venture capital and journalists with tons of experience reporting on the media business. But its viability as a business is far from proven.
Curiously, the one area where Internet media criticism has already proven self-sustaining is e-mail newsletters. Many publications (including my own) have found them to be a hit. Typically, e-mail newsletters strike a balance between summarizing the news and critiquing it. For many, the model is Slate's Today's Papers, a daily digest of how the nation's biggest newspapers cover that day's stories. The feature, written by Scott Shuger, has had the unfortunate experience of falling between the site's paid and free circulation strategies, but it remains one of Slate's most popular attractions. It currently has about 42,000 daily subscribers, and receives an additional 500,000 monthly page views on the Web site. The e-mail newsletter is like a friendly parasite, living off the host of traditional reporters' work. Theoretically, the newspapers and Web sites publishing the original stories could be concerned about losing readers to such newsletters. The Industry Standard's Media Grok deals with that by including links to the original stories, encouraging readers who want more information to go directly to individual Web pages. That's helpful to readers, but it also placates turf-conscious reporters; not only do most of them not object to having pieces included in Grok -- they frequently lobby for it.
The popularity of online media writing is helping to reshape what is meant by media criticism. Some argue that the limited time that most readers spend on individual Internet sites -- usually just a few minutes per visit -- favors short, snappy nuggets of writing, as opposed to more investigative or analytic material. MediaNews, for example, picks up items of criticism and links directly to columns of media criticism (such as those in The Nation and Boston Phoenix), but it's difficult to label the site as "criticism." Today's Papers' Shuger says he sees his function primarily as news summary, although he adds: "If a day's papers warrants meta criticism, then I do it. Fortunately, most days there is something meta worth saying."
It's also possible, though, that Internet media criticism is, like so much of the Net, simply in its infancy. The Internet has yet to produce a single source of media criticism as popular as, say, Matt Drudge. Perhaps that's because the audience for quality media criticism is naturally limited. But it may also be because no site has yet combined the most compelling advantages of the Net with intelligent, vibrant criticism -- and the reporting resources needed to back it up.
