If the Web can be considered in cosmological terms, then right about now we're in the infinite nanosecond after the Big Bang, an inflationary moment when all that matter spreads itself out. Now things start to coalesce. New technologies and faster connectivity are at work, as is the gravity of financial pressure.
In five years thousands of media jobs have come into existence. Headlines that once surprised -- "Net Draining Talent from Print Media" -- seem familiar. New journalistic content is being created everywhere, but though the audience is continually growing (recent estimates have hit 200 million), it is finite. If one can read breaking news on literally dozens of different sites, for example, how many headline services are likely to prosper?
Yet if there's a chance that some of this new journalism won't be around in another five years, that gives us all the more reason to enjoy the ride while it lasts.
Consider one site, 7am.com, as a measure of the variety of news sources now pulsing updates across the Web every minute of the day. Along with its own breaking stories, the site hosts news from CNNfn, The Washington Post, Reuters, the Sports Network, The Sporting News, ESPN, Eurosport, Wired, ZDNet News, Mr. Showbiz, E! Online, CNN Politics, Salon.com, China Times, CNet Hong Kong, the Bangkok Post, and Wine Spectator, among many others. A streamlined headline service, with an appealingly utilitarian design, 7am.com benefits from its singularity of purpose.
Need to keep up with the technology sector? It's also nice to know there are at least a dozen sites where you can get just about any information you need for free, even as you wonder how they all can possibly thrive.
Every new media company faces this question, particularly those with shareholders. In answer, some are trying to grow into household names, big enough to attract enough readers to survive an increasingly competitive and corporate environment (see "Get Big, Sell Out, or Die," page 28). Others are trying new business models (See "Where the Infinite Meets the Finite," page 26). As an offshoot of escalating wars for attention, we will see a lot of new media brands extending into traditional media, particularly in the form of dot-com-connected television. "Ubiquity is the buzzword of the new millennium," says Lisa Napoli, who covers the Internet for MSNBC. "You need to reach people in places that aren't always logical for you. And it turns out that there is no illogical place to reach people."
The Web may have become a corporate playground in recent years, but it was built to be a delivery system, plain and simple. So journalism has serious competition with other sources of information. Governments, nonprofits, and non-governmental agencies all offer rich and comprehensive Web sites. I can go to www. nyclink.org/health to find the hard facts on how my favorite restaurant fared in its most recent inspection. Or to Vote.com to see a quick poll on banning soft money in politics, or vouchers in education.
Still, journalism permeates the digital space. Specialized-content planets are orbiting subject areas like crime and health and religion and entertainment and finance. Other sites draw readers based on race and ethnicity and gender. Sites like CNN and Salon.com want to be solar systems unto themselves. And the big portals -- AOL, Yahoo!, MSN, Disney's Go Network -- want to be the gatekeepers of entire quadrants. By now online readers can get nearly any approach to the news, from investigative to literary to activist, with criticism (film, television, books) folded in.
New forces may threaten the lovely disorder of this universe. By spring, a digital transformation was being written in New York City stone. At Columbus Circle, on the southwest corner of Central Park, one of Manhattan's most desirable pieces of real estate was giving birth to the future. The Coliseum, a cavernous convention hall created by Robert Moses in 1956, was on schedule to disappear by September. In its dust, pending government approval, will rise the headquarters of the new global digital titan, AOL Time Warner.
Technologically mighty AOL becomes a platform for content-mighty Time Warner, with its magazine empire, CNN broadcasts, Warner Records, and Warner Brothers films. AOL Time Warner boasts more than 100 million combined subscribers. The company is carving its recognizable initials into a cityscape that is home to a sizable portion of the Internet's content creators, and it will have great power over them. "When they link to you, they open the spigot," says David Talbot, the founder and editor of Salon.com. "They can make or break you."
Meanwhile, speaking at an investor conference in Hong Kong via a video link from New York in May, Rupert Murdoch unveiled a plan to bundle News Corp's content and distribution assets into one platform, unofficially named Platco. The media baron promised that strategic partners, to be announced later this summer, would be chosen based on "what people can bring us technologically so we can speed this up.'' The announcement came just weeks after rumored talks between Murdoch's number two, Peter Chernin, and Yahoo! co-founder Jerry Yang, raising the possibility that AOL's biggest rival in the Internet portal game might find its way onto News Corp satellite systems, while Murdoch's news holdings would be prominently featured on the Web 's second most popular home page. (According to Media Metrix, AOL sites had nearly 60 million unique visitors, to Yahoo's 50 million, in April 2000.)
Are corporate chieftains salivating at the prospect of carving the Internet up for themselves? AOL's c.e.o., Steve Case, has always denied it. "Unlike radio and television, the Internet is not the product of scarcity; and unlike telephony and cable, the Internet is not the natural home of monopolists," he told the National Press Club in October 1998. "The Internet is -- and should be -- whatever its users, not private or public gatekeepers, want it to be."
It is hard to imagine that the Internet could be truly monopolized, although consolidation will surely reshape digital space as it has old media. Still, at least for now, exploring the Web feels like a ride through a limitless universe.
SPECIALIZED SITES This spring iServed.com, an Internet publisher of military content, acquired the venerable military newspaper Stars and Stripes (www.stripes.com). Soon after that, on May 10, the site disclosed new information concerning the alleged massacre of hundreds of civilian Koreans by American troops at No Gun Ri, questioning the credibility of individuals identified by The Associated Press as eyewitnesses to the incident in its Pulitzer Prize-winning 1999 report. The Web site for U.S. News & World Report filed a similar story. Within days, the No Gun Ri affair was the subject of a major discussion.
Stripes.com -- like maingate.com and Ross Perot-backed militaryhub.com, both portals -- takes aim at the global audience of active duty personnel, reservists, veterans, military family members, and enthusiasts that has been estimated at 70 to 80 million. Military.com's goal is to "collect the stories of the men and women who have served . . . give voice to those who made history and context to those who want to learn more."
Stars and Stripes and other military news and information sites are just one of a seemingly endless array of budding, niche-oriented media enterprises. For access to straight information about criminal justice, for example, it's hard to beat crimetime.com, operated by Crime Time Publishing. The new crime.com, meanwhile, seems to be trying to slip into the vacuum left by the late APBNews.com.
Tech-world news, of course, is well represented on the electronic frontier. The sites seem endless -- HotWired (hotwired.lycos.com) isn't alone in offering what it calls "continuous updates from the digital front." There is also CNet, ZDNet, techweb.com (www.techWeb.com), as well as online versions of print magazines that grew out of the tech boom, such as Red Herring (www.redherring.com), The Industry Standard (www.thestandard.com), and Time Warner's new eCompany (www.ecompany.com). Not to mention ample coverage of the industry's content beehive, Silicon Alley, from AtNew York, (www.news-ny.com) and the Silicon Alley Reporter (www.siliconalleyreporter.com), which also allows you to "switch coasts" to L.A. for the Digital Coast Daily.
Want health news? Both WebMD and the financially troubled drkoop.com provide it, as does the Mayo Clinic's Health Oasis, at www.mayohealth.org. (Like many sites, this one also links to commerce -- the "Health e-Store," where readers can find books and newsletters about health topics.)
Spiritual health also gets online attention, some of it from the massive beliefnet.com portal, which provides news and also has an impressive array of discussion groups and some top-notch columnists. For the more adventuresome, there's The Spirit Channel (www.spiritchannel.com), which declares itself the world's first "leading holistic lifestyle brand for the twenty-first century."
Space buffs have it especially good, with an extraordinary amount of online resources at their fingertips. Space.com is a definitive site for coverage of space news from business to science. For an alternative spin there is NASA Watch (www.reston.com/nasa/watch.html), a news digest published by Reston Communications that has twice been denied press accreditation by NASA, which considers the site a "vanity" publication, a somewhat dubious assessment.
SPECIALIZED AUDIENCES Sites that aimed at groups of readers based on race, ethnicity, and gender are multiplying. The portal Yupi.com delivers news, sports, entertainment, and free e-mail to the Hispanic community. Portal Uno (www.portaluno.com) links to news organizations in more than twenty European and Latin American countries. Spanish-language specialty publications include +Web, which covers the Internet.
Africana.com's goal is to "bring together authoritative information about the whole world of Africa and her diaspora" with "news and comment from Africa, the Americas, and around the world about the lives, experiences, and needs of black people." It offers a great deal of solid homegrown and reprinted content.
For the gay and lesbian community, Planet Out (www.planetout.com/pno) offers news (from The Advocate, which has its own site at www.advocate.com), politics, and entertainment coverage to its core audience.
And for women, in addition to the financially muscular oxygen.com, the Web companion to the new Oprah-backed women's cable network, and the women's portal iVillage, there is also World Woman News (www.worldwoman.net). World Woman launched on International Women's Day in March. Edited by Leslie Riddoch, who hosts a daily two-hour radio program on BBC Scotland, the site promises to become "a virtual paper written, edited and produced by women and published in every country of the world every month via the Internet."
Some of the "news" on the Internet comes from advocates, not journalists. About-Face (www.about-face.org), combines a gender-based focus with advocacy, combating "negative and distorted images of women" in the media. The main site for the U.S. Public Interest Research Group (www.pirg.org) bolsters an activist approach with hard information. One recent report, "Show Me the Money! A Survey of Payday Lenders," examined the practices of lenders who charge consumers interest rates of 300 percent or more and who are stepping up lobbying efforts to weaken state laws preventing usury.
Policy.com (part of the voxcap.com network) is more neutral -- a huge, non-partisan public policy resource and community that publishes research, opinions, and information about events shaping public policy. VoxCap has nine channels and a few dozen content subchannels (Guns in America, Urban World, etc.).
Inequality.org is put out by a network of journalists devoted to "news, information, and expertise on the divide in income, wealth and health." The site, founded by US News & World Report writer James Lardner, publishes original articles and reprints, such as "Time To Rein in Global Finance," an examination of World Bank and International Monetary Fund policy by William Greider. It also contains contact information for numerous experts, as well as facts, figures, and resources.
ONLINE MAGAZINES With so much recent activity, it's easy to overlook general interest online magazines, which arrived on the Web relatively early. That's because in some cases, things haven't changed much since their arrival. Feed (www.feedmag.com) still offers incisive commentary on media, culture, and technology, with an emphasis on discussion. Similarly, Word (www.word.com) covers issues and culture, often presenting personal essays in innovative, graphics-rich formats. Both magazines seem to bow to the info glut, offering a manageable handful of new content each day; the downside is that they sometimes seem to have lost some of their momentum.
Heavyweights like Salon and Slate have created general interest news brands online, and are developing television shows to attract eyeballs outside the Web. At the same time, after dipping tentative toes into the online waters in recent years, old media are also creating some innovative Web-only content.
"I come from dinosaurland," Sam Donaldson told attendees of "Silicon Alley 2000" in New York City in March. The former White House correspondent anchors a three-times-a-week video news program on ABCNews.com. The site, part of Disney's Go Network, also offers a daily Web-cast called "Political Points," in conjunction with The New York Times.
In another sign that boundaries between media have given way to the economics of brand extension, many online news organizations are jumping off-line, into old media. Space.com recently announced an agreement with Hearst Magazines to publish Space.com Illustrated, which launches from newsstands July 4. Nerve, which calls its content "literate smut," is also planning a print magazine.
While Slate and Salon are producing television shows, AOL Time Warner has something bigger in store: an entire television channel with interactive programming and marketing and new subscription models. In a March speech, AOL Time Warner c.e.o. Steve Case promised that TV was in for a dramatic change. "Basically, TV hasn't changed much since I was growing up," he said. "The biggest difference is that now there are more channels, and it's harder to find things."
Of course, the same goes for the Web. If Case and company have their way, that won't be true when it comes to Time Warner content. Just who gets pulled into their orbit, who stays in independent proximity, and who is cast out into the frosty obscurity and financial no-man's-land of deep space, remains to be seen.
Frank Houston is a Brooklyn writer who covers technology and online media. His last piece for cjr was "What I Saw in the Digital Sea," in the July/August 1999 issue.
