Media - Internet

Editors' Note: This is an expanded version of a piece that appeared in the September/October 2003 issue of CJR. Several years ago, when the Internet was young, I saw a notice in The New York Times that the reporter Matthew L. Wald would be online that day, answering questions from the public. The Times said you could e-mail him in advance and it gave his address, a novelty then. So I bit. I asked...

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."...

The growing power of Weblogs, or "blogs," has hardly gone unnoticed. Bloggers have been credited with helping to topple Trent Lott and Howell Raines, with inflaming debate over the Iraq war, and with boosting presidential hopeful Howard Dean. Suddenly, it seems, everyone from Barbra Streisand (whose site is a lefty clearinghouse) to guy-next-door Bruce Cole (a San Francisco foodie whose blog is...

This February, I attended my first Association of Alternative Newsweeklies conference, in the great media incubator of San Francisco. It's impossible to walk a single block of that storied town without feeling the ghosts of great contrarian media innovators past: Hearst and Twain, Hinckle and Wenner, Rossetto and Talbot. But after twelve hours with the AAN, a much different reality set in: never...

Dear journalist, fear not the blog. Embrace the blog. Weblogs are online journals consisting of brief entries displayed in chronological order on a page (see "Online Uprising," June). They are usually (but not always) written in a conversational voice and usually (but not always) peppered with links and references to other sites. If you've visited Jim Romenesko's MediaNews (poynter.org/medianews)...

There are a couple of ways to achieve chart-topping success in online news. The conventional route is to link a team of new-media journalists with a print or broadcast heavyweight. And then there's Yahoo! News. Yahoo! News (news.yahoo.com), the third most popular news site in the U.S., needs no reporters and creates no stories. It is the ultimate aggregator of online media, republishing the work...

Full disclosure: I like bloggers. This is partly because my life as a freelance writer makes me naturally sympathetic to their independence of media institutions, partly because I find the bloggers' (short for Web loggers) endless links and commentary about stories in papers I wouldn't ordinarily see quite useful, and partly because my own political bent (hawkish, impatient with P.C. hand-wringing...

So startups are going belly-up. That doesn’t mean that online content is dead. Far from it. Squarely here to stay are newspapers, nearly all of which have developed some online presence in recent years to expand their brand of newsgathering. We’ve talked to the online operations of six newspapers--some big, some small, from different areas of the country--to find out about what they’ve built in a...

(Continued from yesterday.) The IDC report had a few interesting comparisons. The break-up of time spent on various media showed that though 48.4 per cent of the respondents said watching TV was their favourite indoor activity, they ended up spending more time on the PC (18 hours per week) than on the TV (16 hours per week). Thus, on an average, among all classes, a little more than two hours were...

The financial status of new media resembles real estate development in the early 1980s, when tax laws supported huge debt that fueled extravagant building. When tax laws changed, however, the original business assumptions no longer supported the big, expensive projects, many of which went bankrupt. Most were purchased out of receivership at amounts supportable by new market realities, and they...