I asked about the challenge of balancing her traditional duties as a reporter with those as an audio-oriented interviewer. Some old hands in the N & O newsroom saw the gadgetry as a threat. It was all too remindful of the days when computers were replacing typewriters in the newsroom, and many reporters and editors balked at being typesetters. But Powers turned the new technology to her advantage. The microphone and electronic camera—a photographer followed her around—made her more aware of her surroundings and sensitive to new story angles. Once she did a story on Ten Commandment Mountain. It was part of a Biblical theme park, a peak in western North Carolina with God’s words spelled out in “concrete letters each measuring five feet high and four feet wide.” A roar from a giant lawn mower kept drowning out the voice of the man she was interviewing. “They always ask,” he volunteered, “how do you mow that mountain?” Presto, she had the magic quote to use near the lead. “A special mower with a low center of gravity,” she revealed, “tilts and leans up and down the steep planes.”
Whether reading about twenty-five-cent hamburgers or godly peaks, I could scoot easily between pictures and words. The N & O had a “North Carolina Discoveries” logo at the top of one page, a picture of Powers in the same area, and then a list of the Discoveries stories that she had done. By clicking my mouse on a list of story headlines in blue letters, I could immediately go to the stories. When I chose “Home Sweet Hangar,” I sped to the same headline atop a color photo of an aviation buff inspecting “his Cessna 172 after rolling it out of the hangar at his house in Lake Norman Airpark.” Yes, the caption was there too. And then I saw the story lead with an apt quote (“It’s like being an avid golfer and living on the golf course”) followed by a list of other items. I could choose “Audio: Talking about life on the flight line” if I wanted to hear an interview. What’s more, if I’d set up my software, I could even have picked “Video” and gone on to a list of short movies. I also saw background items such as a list of “Triangle-area flight schools” and “FAA regulations: How to get your pilot’s license.” The beauty of this arrangement was that the N & O could provide all kinds of wonderful details for the interested without inflicting them on others. Unless they mouse-clicked the appropriate words in blue letters (or whatever the special color), they would never see the material.
The N & O used the same approach on news stories. When North Carolina was about to gas a man named David Lawson, readers could click on the item “The Lawson Execution.” They could see a schedule of the events ahead—from Lawson’s removal from his cell to the EKG examination that would help certify his death. After the Associated Press reported the execution, readers could click on a headline and read the details. They could even summon up “Preparing for the execution” or “How the gas chamber works.”
The Lawson story was a just a sample—the N & O at the time wasn’t constantly doing multimedia on breaking news—but it was easy to envision the future for American newspapers using the Web. Imagine the blessings for journalists who wanted to write on neat little odds and ends without getting in the way of their main articles. They could merely add “links” to offshoot stories. Perhaps the reader could even click and summon up a collateral audio report or even a video. At first it might be hard to do all this on deadline, but links would be a cinch as software improved. What’s more, newspaper writers might evolve into true personalities just like their counterparts on television. After all, if a reporter’s byline were in blue letters, you could click your mouse to see a photo and maybe even a bio featuring credentials—you could find out, for example, if the legal reporter held a law degree. You could also quickly locate copies of earlier work or a list of his or her favorite books.
Granted, electronic newspapers posed new challenges. Not all stories lent themselves to multimedia, for example. What if newspapers played down those that didn’t? “If you tried to do that with a lot of news stories,” Julie Powers told me, “you would end up serving the video masters rather than the news functions.” Still, in the end, the reader would enjoy far more choices than before.
The Web, as I saw it, held out yet other possibilities for local papers such as the N & O. Suppose you lived in Chapel Hill and wanted to see what news had happened there in the past 24 hours; you could click on a map of the Raleigh area and behold a story list from your town. Neighborhood-level submaps could show still more. You could read the most minor tidbits—for example, new requests for zoning changes or items from neighborhood newsletters. Even more helpful, you could find old stories and other background information. Let’s say you were shopping for a condo on a certain street. You might think the neighborhood was safe—Chapel Hill is a university town, remember—but learn that many crimes had occurred nearby. Furthermore, you could adjust the kind of information that you summoned from the Web. For example, you could see lists of houses for sale in a neighborhood and then retrieve their photos along with audio sales presentations. Moving on to another information category, you could uncover lists of nearby stores or see test scores from the closest elementary school. And you might even see ads from nearby restaurants and click on them to order.
The food-related examples weren’t entirely hypothetical; Zonker Harris pointed me toward me some mock ads from Hardee’s and a chain called Little Caesar’s Pizza. The same business principles I discussed in chapter 2 applied here. Rather than planning to inflict vast quantities of material on the unwilling, the N & O made the ads useful and entertaining. Elsewhere in the N & O area I saw an ad for a computer dealer, among others, but the real triumph was the area from Mammoth Records—with home pages for bands, promo photos, discographies, tour dates, album covers, and more, including a catalogue and, yes, free samples.
But what about the economics of all this? Via an electronic edition the N & O wouldn’t collect the fifty cents it charged per hard copy issue, but it wouldn’t have to buy newsprint and distribution services. That was how George Schlukbier hoped the newspaper would turn a profit eventually. The electronic activities, although not yet profitable as a whole, were coming along. People on the Net, for example, were calling up the pages within the N & O’s area several hundred thousand times a week. A page was what you saw when you clicked the mouse to call up an item, and each page could be just a few lines of information, or go on for a number of screens. Zonker Harris expected that by the end of 1994 as many people would be dialing up the N & O as called up SunSite UNC, the popular collection of files at the University of North Carolina. Readers retrieved Mammoth Record’s pages some 35,000 times a week. That didn’t mean 35,000 people—there was plenty of repeat business, and of course the same people looked at more than one page—but the numbers looked good as a start.
Just who, however, was reading the Web areas of the N & O and other Internet publications? The Washington Post and many other dailies had chosen to avoid the Net for the moment because they thought that the right people weren’t there. And some marketers and journalists tried to reinforce such arguments by citing a study of 4,777 Web readers by researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Ninety-four percent were men, and 56 percent were 21-30 years old—almost half were students or faculty members or had other university ties. “These are hardly the type of people to make large consumer or business purchases,” a San Francisco Chronicle story observed. The experience of JoAnn and Bob Lilienfeld, as recounted in chapter 2, showed that riches would not automatically come to merchants on the Web. And yet the potential was there. The Web readers uncovered by the institute weren’t charity cases—just yups. Studying the readers of the Baseball server, the N & O found they were a long way from poverty. Twenty percent of these Netfolks, for example, earned $35,000-$50,000 a year, 18 percent earned $50,000-$75,000, and 4 percent earned more than $75,000. And, of course, many of these Netfolks were young people who would carry their Net habit over to their jobs and their personal lives. Not surprisingly, Schlukbier claimed keen interest from representatives of companies such as J.C. Penney and Radio Shack, and, of course, from fast-food chains, which, in so many cases, targeted their ads at the young.
Cleverly the N & O built on existing relationships with advertisers. If you were already on the paper and bought X number of lines, then you could get the Net as a bonus. North Carolina businesses paid as little as $50 a month in basic fees to be in the N & O’s area on the Net, not including add-ons such as design services. Big national firms would pay well into the thousands. Given the newness of the medium, this would scare off many—unless, like the N & O itself, they saw the Net as an investment in the future. Then the experiment might work. In my mind, however, there was one other variable: What about national publications competing with local papers for the same national advertisers? Already Time Warner and the N & O were watching each other carefully.