Time Warner also showed network savvy by following the example of GNN and similar publications and providing some hypertext pointers to the rest of the Internet, rather than expecting readers to stay within its own area. Time Warner even enlisted some of its household names in the cause. The electronic version of Entertainment Weekly, for example, did not just review Madonna or Springsteen or the latest Hollywood films; it also directed people to popular, entertainment-oriented sites on the Net itself by way of hypertext links. I still wanted to see many, many more links—a strength of GNN. But I suspected that would come in time.
Planning the Pathfinder service, Time Warner had even consulted with the publisher of Wired. “They’re providing real news, not just PR blather or sales areas for their products,” said Chip Bayers, the managing editor of HotWired, the Wired offshoot on the Web. And he was right.
I myself was no cheerleader for Time Warner in some ways—I worried about media concentrations.[[4.16]] But here the Suits deserved their due. HotWired offered avant-garde graphics on the Web along with services such as bulletin boards and free archives; I was pleased, yet hardly surprised. Wired, after all, was still a bit of an upstart despite heavy investment from a corporate arm of the powerful Newhouse family.[[4.17]] But Time Warner was different—the epitome of the journalistic and Hollywood establishments, a company with many benefits from the status quo. I recalled the upbeat stories that Time had run about the world of 500-channel television. Such articles betrayed far more tolerance of the “one to many” broadcast model, as opposed to the newer, more anarchistic model of the Net. Many in the Time Life tower, especially on the entertainment side, might still harbor these less adventurous visions. And yet the company was now spreading its bets around. That seemed sensible enough, given the chilliness that some test markets had shown interactive TV.
A Time writer named Philip Elmer-DeWitt had grown more and more attuned to the potential of the Net. He was a regular on The WELL, the bulletin board system frequented by many of the elite journalists on the Internet. Again and again Elmer-DeWitt showed up on newsgroups and mailing lists with spunky, opinionated posts on such topics as the media and telecommunications. He lent his name to a successful legal campaign to aid Brock Meeks, a small publisher on the Net who faced a libel suit from a mail-order tycoon in Ohio. What’s more, Elmer-DeWitt was sensitive to the threats from the Clipper chip, which Washington might use someday to invade the privacy of millions of Americans. He clearly represented the interests of his employer, but he did so with a good mix of wit and smarts that endeared him to many on the Internet. His electronic signature said, “Read Time on America Online where we are paid to take abuse.”
Enlivened by posts from Netfolks and WELLfolks whom Elmer-DeWitt had befriended, Time’s message board thrived on America Online. But now, quite correctly, Time had run an article pointing out the advantages of the Internet from the perspective of publishers. Time raised a big question, the same one Frank Daniels had asked. Did publications really have to fork over such a hefty percentage of their online revenue to commercial services, such as America Online, when the Internet existed? Time Warner’s well-stocked area on the Net was itself an answer of sorts. Granted, the company’s outpost on America Online wasn’t about to vanish. Time Warner was testing both interactive TV and computers as transmission vehicles; similarly the company was not committing itself to any single network in cyberspace. I took it for granted that sooner or later Time Warner might end up on the network that Bill Gates was starting. Just as Time reached newsstands everywhere, the electronic equivalent could seek out eyes wherever the phone lines led. Sports Illustrated, Fortune, and People would soon be on CompuServe. And yet Time Warner’s priority in the computer world was clear: the Internet above all else, at least for the moment.
“When we put Time on America Online,” said Walter Isaacson, editor of new media at Time, “it is done on their server, using their software, and only someone subscribing to America Online and using America Online software can access it. On the Web, anyone using public domain software can get to it.” I could just have substituted “News & Observer” for “Time,” an impression only strengthened by the next sentence: “We have a direct relationship to our readers.” Isaacson went on: “There will be massive amounts more content from Time Inc. on the Web than on America Online or CompuServe, which will just feature individual magazines.”
Some twenty-two magazines were to go on the Web. Isaacson said around ten editors would participate full or part time. Total investment in the Web site was to reach the “mid six figures,” and “with advertising it should be in the black within a year.”[year.”] “There may be a mix of ads and subscription fees,” Isaacson said. Mercifully, the advertising would not be the intrusive Prodigy kind that popped up on the bottom of my screen in a garish, Vegas style.
Jim Kinsella, the ex-newspaper editor who presided over the Web area, said he was pushing for a subscription fee of around $8 a month. I would have wanted the price to be a few dollars lower, but it was fine if I got enough for my money. If nothing else, Kinsella wanted readers to be able to stay online without the time charges that made thousands unplug their hookups with America Online and similar services. A product manager with Microsoft would later say as much to the New York Times in discussing Bill Gates’ new service: “We’re trying to reduce the threshold of pain. We think users hate connect fees.”[[4.18]]
Kinsella’s $8 monthly fee—his proposed figure, not Time Warner’s—would be for Pathfinder itself, not for the Internet connection. I did some quick math. Pathfinder could indeed be a competitive possibility if Time Warner were able to lower the cost of using the Internet by way of cable television from the $75-$100 a month that people typically paid for such arrangements.
Mass use might enable Time Warner to undercut the $20 that the N & O presently charged. Typical readers might want to keep reading a local newspaper, and the N & O could drop its own prices, but this was still a good example of how national media just might drain at least some readers away from the local media. Understandably, Kinsella was thinking in mass, national terms, as I would have done. He predicted that within five or ten years half the country might be able to reach the Net in one way or another. Others at Time were similarly optimistic.