In rich countries such as the United States and Sweden, the need for national digital libraries would only grow with the introduction of better televisions and video games, not to mention the distractions of the Net itself—including virtual reality, at some point. Even in wealthy nations, people had only so much disposable income. How much of it would be left for online books? Mightn’t we use e-forms and digital libraries to transfer resources from paperwork to knowledge? As much as I applauded the good work that Frank Daniels was doing with the third graders in Raleigh, I was a little put off by the online questionnaire for adults and children using his BBS. It asked about favorite TV programs, physical appearance, sports, and other activities, but a simple question was missing—one that I felt certain would have been on the list twenty years ago: “What are your favorite books?”
Spring 1995: An (Interim) Afterword
Whatever the medium—newspapers, books, or magazines—many Netfolks saw the Internet as a path to diversity. That was partly why I liked seeing The News & Observer online with A. C. Snow et al. Maybe the Internet could rescue locally owned newspapers before they all tumbled down the maws of conglomerates. On May 17, 1995, however, The NandO Times, the Webbed newspaper of the N & O, ran a story that I’d never wanted to read. A chain was buying up the company. For perhaps the first time, a Net daily reported on the sale of it and its pulped-wood siblings.
A color photo showed Frank Daniels III briefing his staff. What really caught my eye, however, was a revelation that I saw later in the New York Times: “Frank Daniels III said he was convinced that the paper needed to find a larger parent in part to give the paper the resources necessary to nurture those new electronic efforts.” More than a few of us newspaper junkies had hoped that the new technology would help keep the N & O local. I recalled one reason why Daniels had not dumped his N & O stock in the 1980s in favor of an investment in an online service. “The relationship between a newspaper and a community,” he had said, “has such a richness and history that communities shouldn’t lose that.” Now, however, after 101 years in the Daniels family, the N & O and trimmings were going to a California chain for $373 million. The buyer was McClatchy Newspapers Inc., the former employer of George Schlukbier, the Daniels’s new-media guru.
No wicked corporate conspiracies existed here. The Danielses simply felt comfortable with McClatchy, which not only shared the N & O’s still basically liberal politics but also enjoyed a good reputation in the newspaper business.
Run out of Sacramento, McClatchy Newspapers was a family-owned chain with just twelve dailies. It allowed much more leeway to local editors than many others did, and I might well have reacted just as the Daniels family did when the McClatchy people came calling. The N & O mustn’t end up in the hands of some skinflint chain; McClatchy Newspapers could be an excellent alternative.
Still, the sale did not delight me. The Net, after all, was supposed to be good for small guys, including, presumably, family-owned enterprises. Josephus Daniels had bought the N & O at that bankruptcy auction in 1894, seen it through the Roaring Twenties, the stockmarket crash, and the heyday of his friend FDR. He must have died thinking that the Daniels name would forever grace the masthead. From a portrait in the boardroom, he looked out at his progeny announcing the transaction. Just why couldn’t all the computers and cables and videocams have helped strengthen the family business, not force its sale?
I could see how the latter may have happened. The Daniels had had to invest in both the printing press and the new media, with an emphasis on the plural. A story on newsprint, an Internet audio, and a video would cost more than just an old-fashioned version. Network-related expenses of the N & O may have been smaller than the investment in new press, but they would only grow in the future. No-frills Web areas cost next to nothing to set up. But net.papers with the very flashiest graphics and full-motion video would need programmers and designers and other specialists, not all of them cheap. At the same time the Daniels wanted to cover their circulation area well, and that meant a big, expensive staff of reporters, too.
Just as important, however, the N & O faced strong competition for advertisers and readers. Yes, the Net shrank distances and gave smaller companies some new marketing opportunities. But as shown by Time Warner’s giant electronic newsstand, it could also create some good synergies for media conglomerates offering package deals to national advertisers. In certain respects—hardly all—readers also benefited. I could key in “Carly Simon,” for example, and see any stories that might have appeared about her, not only in Time but also in Entertainment Weekly or People. Frank Daniels could bring together wire service news and offbeat items from technical publications and others. But in the future he couldn’t match the brand appeal of corporations such as Time Warner.
Daniels had a right to be proud of his technological accomplishments, of course. But from now on, assuming that he stayed, as he apparently would for the moment, he would be an employee rather than a member of the owning family. Forget the Third Wave talk of Net saving us all from conglomerates. We could all have our own home pages on the World Wide Web, of course, and maybe put out little magazines; and IUMA-style startups could always use the new technology to startle the Goliaths—and in the end, exceptions notwithstanding, the Internet did foster diversity. Clearly, though, it was far from an all-purpose savior for the N & Os of the world. However powerful in North Carolina, the Raleigh newspaper was hardly on an equal footing when it competed against the very largest media organizations.