Still, like the Raleigh area, the N & O has evolved. In a nearby building, a small crew is putting out electronic newspapers on the Internet and on a bulletin board system. This isn’t just a pulp-and-ink-era newspaper company. It’s also an Internet provider. Aided by two phone companies, the N & O gives out free Internet service to teachers and students to find out what the latter would like online in the future. It’s offered Netfolks a colorful, multimedia tour of the state. Tens of thousands drop by the N & O area each week. “The Internet is like the real world—unorganized, unruly, and filled with more happenings than any one person can possibly track,” says Frank Daniels III, the paper’s executive editor. “It’s growing at a fantastic speed, and its citizens are literate. An opportunity for editors!”[[4.2]]
Not everyone on the print side feels as he does. When a Washington Post writer did a gossipy little item on Cliff Stoll’s net.exposé, the journalist said book editors were looking forward to reviewing Silicon Snake Oil as “confirmation of what they hoped was true all along.”[[4.3]] That may or may not have been a joke. Whatever the case, a war is going on between pulped wood and electrons. Can commercial publications, from newspapers to book publishers, learn to love the Internet, and what does this mean to us readers?
“There is no doubt in my mind that the Net will force a transformation of newspapers,” says Peter Lewis, a cyberspace writer for the New York Times, “but demise? That’s what they said about radio and television as well.”[[4.4]] Just the same, a headline in Wired magazine said online newspapers “still suck.” Many newspapers are too enamored with the traditional models where editors and writers inflict whatever they want on the unsuspecting public. They don’t give their readers enough of a chance to speak back online or communicate with each other. Still, the best electronic publications can indeed be two way. And more and more of them will be packaged for the medium. You’ll be able to read summaries of stories, for example, and then summon up longer versions with a click of the mouse.
Even ads may improve. “Think of the typical print tire ad,” says Teresa Martin, an online expert with the Knight-Ridder newspaper chain. “Yawn. But what if touching each tire bought up detailed specs about it, or the sizes in which the store currently has it in stock—or even some really cool car careening around a racetrack with the voice-over ‘speed rated?’ The ad can be like a window to a store, enticing the reader in to look for information.”
I know—computers are too hard for many technophobes to learn, too big to use in bed, and often too blurry or flickery to read off of; and batteries are forever eager for their next charge. But life will get better. It will happen faster if governments worry less about smartening up TV sets and more about smartening up schoolchildren with programs that drive down the cost of book-friendly computers. Much, however, is already going on. Xerox, for example, has experimented with a computer screen whose output is as sharp as printing on paper. It’s a power hog, but less hungry screens are coming. Writing in Digital Media, Martin says the right hardware could be a mere six years away.[[4.5]] I myself think—based on my monitoring of technical publications—that her estimate is conservative.
Besides, even now, electronic texts can at least complement the paper kind. For example, they can increase the variety of newspapers, books, and magazines available. After U.S. Senator Jesse Helms joked that Bill Clinton would need a bodyguard to protect him from angry service people who resented his military policies, I did not rely just on the Washington Post for details. I called up the story directly from the News & Observer hundreds of miles away. What’s more, it’s easy to wander from one electronic publication to others when you are after facts on the same topic, or to search back issues of newspapers and magazines. Even novelists are discovering the possibilities of the new media. Readers can choose their own endings or pass on suggestions to the authors of works in progress.
Adventurous media people are trying to adapt to this online world as gracefully as they can, and the Internet is oh so enticing to many. The cost of the technology has fallen to the point where a bare-bones newspaper can go on the World Wide Web by investing as little as $5,000-$10,000 up front. Publishers needn’t divvy up revenue with a commercial online service, such as America Online or CompuServe.
Compared to pulped wood, the Net looks better and better—the price of paper shot up some 30 percent between the fall of 1994 and the spring of 1995. Environmental regulators are forcing the pulp mills to quit sullying the air and the water, and new mills can cost half a billion dollars each to build. “Like the rest of us,” writes Jonathan Seybold, publisher of Digital Media, “the paper company executives read all of the press stuff about the Information Highway, the rise of online services, and the decline of paper-based publishing.” And he says they are now asking, “Why should we invest in a new paper mill?” The result? Newsprint shortages and higher prices. “The fear,” Seybold says, “creates its own reality.”[[4.6]]
More than 100 newspapers either are on the Internet or are planning to be there. The New York Times, for example, has used the World Wide Web to transmit a fax edition condensed from the normal paper. A full-grown Times may be on the Net now. The San Jose Mercury News in California not only is online, it offers a service called News Hound. For just $10 a month, the Hound will automatically scan a massive database from Knight-Ridder papers and additional dailies, then e-mail you the latest articles on the cover girls of Sports Illustrated, on Afghanistan, on the Chicago Bears, on Bill Clinton, or on any other topic that quickens your pulse or makes you reach for your Valium. From the Halifax Daily News to Poland’s Gazeta Wyborcza, newspapers are trying the Net. Even a strike paper, published by reporters of the San Francisco Examiner and Chronicle, made it into cyberspace.
Some Netfolks preferred the strike daily to the electronic spin-offs of the regular ones, and I wasn’t surprised. What applies to business applies to newspapers: The Net is a great equalizer in some ways; a small newspaper can reach as far-flung a readership as an international daily. In fact, the first paper on the World Wide Web just might have been the Palo Alto Weekly from Silicon Valley. South Africa’s Mail & Guardian, a 30,000-circulation weekly, finds the Internet a much cheaper way to reach people overseas than air-mail. Devoted to Russian news, the St. Petersburg Press uses the Internet to serve an English-speaking audience throughout the world. The London Telegraph has shown up on the Net with some striking graphics. No longer is the Internet just for little magazines published by techies and smart young English majors.