Some other newspapers felt happy with Prodigy. “No,” said Mike Gordon, an editor with Cox Newspapers in Atlanta, “Prodigy isn’t taking most of the money.” What’s more, his online edition could enjoy revenue from online ads. Still, more and more publishers were turning to the Internet rather than Prodigy-type alternatives, and the balance of power changed. When Microsoft started a new online service later, it offered newspapers as much as 80 percent of revenue—at least several times the amount that Prodigy had offered the N & O. (The Atlanta papers would themselves end up on the Internet eventually, not just on Prodigy.)
Instead of relying on a Prodigy-style service, Schlukbier started a locally oriented BBS with an Internet connection and a strong emphasis on schoolchildren, not just the adult readers of today. This orientation may have baffled many. Some newspaper publishers were too myopic to see past the next quarter, especially if they worked for the big chains. Exceptions did exist, of course. Knight-Ridder, for example, regardless of its public ownership and its Videotext flop, was still pouring millions into the new technology. As a family-owned newspaper, however, without security analysts breathing down its corporate neck, the N & O was especially free to experiment. Schlukbier believed that a decade would pass before 40 or 50 percent of the homes in Raleigh were online, and by then the children would be of customer age.
“By focusing on third-graders,” Schlukbier said, “I’ve got ten years to learn from them what information they really need and want.”[[4.13]] What they hoped for, in many ways, didn’t seem like a newspaper at all. Rather they wanted their own tools. The bulletin board blossomed with imaginary worlds in which, for example, Frank Daniels was the owner of a fictitious newsstand. Children could wend their ways through cyberspace by using written descriptions and computer commands to tell where they were and what they were doing. George Schlukbier’s young son, Shane, designed a mythical camp online with danger-ridden woods. Some may have wondered how this applied to newspapers; I myself did. And then it dawned: if newspapers would be increasingly two-way in the future, just like the Net, then didn’t it make sense to see how the children interacted with each other, as they did in role-playing games? The children could change as they grew older, or moved away from the area when their parents packed up for another job with IBM, but the journalists could still observe the basic patterns.
The N & O put more than 6,000 children and 700 teachers online for free. NandOLand was the name of the educational service designed with children in mind; a mouse click on a cloud, for example, would take children to a NASA area on the Net. The students could send electronic mail to each other or type to each other instantly. “I have seen children who never cared what they wrote turn to a dictionary rather than send a letter to a key pal with misspelled words,” said a teacher named Stephanie Toney. “I have seen a child with a severe reading disability sit for hours and concentrate on e-mail to another person on the other side of the world. His English teacher would have given her right arm to interest him in reading and writing for this period of time.”
Granted, NandOLand wasn’t the entire solution to the needs of children. Many couldn’t spend much time on a machine at school and lacked one at home. But the program was much better than the alternative: expensive school connections to the Net or no Internet at all.
Like the children, the N & O itself was learning—about the local schools and other institutions and the Net itself. “How many newspaper editors and reporters get to talk with students, parents, and teachers any time they want to without making a big deal of it?” asked Daniels.[[4.14]] And so the educational coverage was better. Rosalind Resnick, publisher of Interactive Publishing Alert, wrote that the N & O was “at the head of the pack when it comes to promoting interactivity between its readers and reporters.” By the summer of 1995 every staff member, including those in circulation and advertising, would be able to go on the Net from their desks. Daniels’ own Net address showed up on the paper’s editorial page each day. The N & O was publishing a dozen or two Internet items each month, complete with a column called “Net Rider.” How different the paper was from a rival in nearby Durham: “We don’t print many Internet stories,” a staffer there said when I asked to speak to whoever covered the Net. The words were spoken almost in a way to suggest that “Internet” was synonymous with “N & O.”
Not everyone was happy with the N & O’s Internet service. Around 700 people had subscribed commercially by fall 1994, paying $20 a month, and some rightly complained about the look and feel of the BBS and the busy phone lines they had encountered during the summer. When I posted a query on the Internet, at least half of the replies were hostile to the online N & O. Some showed a knee-jerk hatred because they disagreed with the paper’s politics. But others were right on target. The BBS incarnation of NandO.Net, the name for the commercial part of the online endeavors, was more of a rutted dirt road than an eight-lane information highway. Customers for some months had trouble dialing up the service’s modems for want of enough phone lines. Other glitches arose. The service prided itself on the ability to whip people back and forth between the local board and the Internet-related services without any effort. And yet in making the transitions, customers suffered delays and software glitches that they might not encounter with a more polished service. Schoolchildren and BBS junkies were the best kinds of people to enjoy the wild ride and the scenery.
The online N & O responded with some technical improvements; the paper added many more phone lines and gave customers the ability to use Mosaic to point and click their way through the Web. Mosaic had a much smoother feel than the BBS software. By late 1994 the N & O was offering the public an electronic newspaper and the Internet at the competitive rate of $20 a month while helping to subsidize the educational side. And it was serving people with different levels of equipment. The BBS was designed to work especially well with less powerful machines and snailish modems that were far too slow for Mosaic.
On the Net, the people who answered my queries had another major complaint—the inability of NandO.Net to make alt.sex-style groups conveniently available. Frank Daniels made no apologies. However liberal towns like Chapel Hill might be, the state as a whole was of the opposite bent. And that included more than a few church-goers in Raleigh. “The community standards of our community don’t mix with some of the sexual parts of Usenet,” Daniels said, “so we edit them out.” In addition, most subscribers were children. “I have a seven year old,” he said, “and I don’t want him delving into alt.sex.bestiality or those other places.” Many of the Netheads would have said that one person’s “editing” was another’s “censorship.” I myself, however, understood Daniel’s worries. At least two other Net services were available in the same area, so it wasn’t as if he were gatekeeping for the entire town; what’s more, he said that when the software allowed, the sex-related newsgroups would be available as an option. Just the same, the issue epitomized the clash between the gatekeeping ethos and that of the Internet.
More serious than the lack of alt.sex, to my mind, was Daniels’ failure to appreciate sufficiently the political freedom of Usenet, the same service that had attracted him to the Internet in the first place. I complained to him that his own BBS included far, far less in the way of political discussion than I’d have wanted, and I contrasted this to the robust debates of Usenet. “To be honest, David,” he said, “I think one of the least useful pieces of the Internet so far is their political discussions. They’re not very good ones. There’s a lot of flaming. The political discussions aren’t very productive. I follow mainly the local ones here. These people discuss national issues and never have a policymaker looking in there. So why discuss it if it isn’t going to have an impact on policy?”