Trying to describe The Morning News (themorningnews.org) makes a journalist yearn for a new, Web-focused edition of the AP Stylebook. The site is not a blog, insists Rosecrans Baldwin, the News's twenty-six-year-old editor, since it uses different voices. Nor does he like the term 'zine – "a word that implies things that don't have advertising, get photocopied, and show up in music stores."
Whatever you call it, the Brooklyn-based Morning News and many emerging sites like it combine social observation, wit, news, fiction, and humor in new weights and combinations. Technology made them possible, but a hunger for reading material with more of the writers' voice in it seems to be the fuel driving their rapid proliferation.
Underneath the ambiguities at The Morning News lurks smart, witty writing. Started by Baldwin as a daily e-mail of quirky news stories, the site evolved, with the help of co-editor Andrew Womack, to its current status, what its masthead calls "a Web-based broadsheet, published weekdays." In recent issues, The Morning News has ranged from writer Clay Risen's personal anxiety about sharing a name with the newest star of American Idol to Joshua Allen's alleged transcript of a Bush/Cheney discussion about credibility, to John Warner on troubling signs of advancing age, one of which may be a growing appreciation for country music. The site also links to news stories, both serious and odd.
Other publications in the growing digital universe provide variations on similar themes. Flak Magazine (flakmag.com) is written mostly by professional journalists and contains somewhat more hard news than The Morning News. But a young sensibility is woven through for what editor James Norton calls "a nexus between humor writing and professional standards."
Norton also works for The Christian Science Monitor. Ben Brown, an Austin-based consultant and editor of Uber (uber.nu), places his site on the creative side of the spectrum. "We try to put out absurdity, satire, and zany personal stories." Michael Goldberg, a former editor at Rolling Stone and at SonicNet created Neumu.net, with Web designer Emme Stone, to incorporate alternative music news with portraiture, drawings, and audio-visual feeds.
McSweeney's Internet Tendency (mcsweeneys.net), a pioneer online publication formed from the journal McSweeney's Quarterly Concern, has developed a large cult following for its sharp, funny writing. Recent examples: Claire Zulkey's set of questions for VH1's I Love the '80s expert celebrity commentators (sample: "1984 – What was with that 'Where's the Beef' lady? Where is the beef?" or John Leary's "Immigrant Guide to Translating American Workplace Slang" (sample: "Shit rolls downhill" – "I lament the perceived inequalities of our capitalist system.")
Other sites in this new universe include Opium Magazine (opiummagazine.com), which touts itself as "literary humor for the deliriously captivated"; Sweet Fancy Moses (sweetfancymoses.com), "where wit lives"; and Australian-based Retort Magazine (retortmagazine.com), which tells readers to "think forward – answer back."
The popularity of online magazines – The Morning News says it gets 162,500 unique visitors a month and Flak says it has 100,000-plus – reveals an audience eager for wit and the personal voice. Sarah Hepola, a regular in The Morning News, thinks this "voice" personalizes the news experience. "When I publish a story in a paper," she says. "I generally get a world of silence in return. If mainstream media is missing something, it's probably this human connection, this strange almost-intimacy that the Internet allows."
Some of the online editors think their success may reveal a future shift in the style of news that people demand. Neumu's Goldberg says that technology and its worldwide reach would allow any shift to occur faster. But most of the young editors point out that it's a bit soon to predict what effect their publications will have. "The Internet is very new and no one knows where it's going to go," Baldwin says. "I think we try to keep that in our head the whole time and do no more than publish good stories."
