A Decade of Progress in Online News

By: Steve Outing Ten years ago this week, I attended the first Internet World conference in New York City. It was great inspiration to be at that landmark event, which marked the beginning of the modern commercial Internet -- the great cyber gold rush of the mid- to late 1990s.

For me, it was a transition point between my previous career in print newspapers and my new one on the Net -- though didn't really leave newspapers. Soon after the conference I began writing about, researching, and consulting on the intersection of media -- especially newspapers -- and the Internet.

So, on this anniversary of that seminal conference, let's look back at the last decade of online news -- to see how far we've come, what we've learned, and what we still haven't figured out. I've enlisted the aid of David Carlson, an online news pioneer who's been in this game longer than I have, and the author of The Online Timeline, a Web history of the online news industry. Carlson is the Cox Foundation Palm Beach Post professor of new media journalism at the University of Florida at Gainesville.

History lesson

The Internet was hardly new in 1993 -- at least to the academic and scientific communities. On June 9 the year prior, the U.S. Congress had removed restrictions prohibiting commercial use of the Net. Just a few months before the '93 Internet World event, the first graphical Web browser, Mosaic, was released by University of Illinois researchers. (Mosaic, the brainchild of Marc Andreesen, was later to become the basis for the popular commercial browser Netscape.) Then, on the same day as the conference, technology writer John Markoff wrote the first article to appear in The New York Times about the World Wide Web and Mosaic.

The Internet gold rush was on.

Not surprisingly, the newspaper industry was a bit slow to catch on. While entrepreneurs grasped the significance of a commercial Internet and the importance of Mosaic and ran with it quickly, news executives -- never known for being overly free with research & development (R&D) spending -- reacted cautiously. While many a newspaper Web site started up in 1994 and 1995, most were modestly funded and staffed, and relied on "shovelware" -- publishing content from their print products online.

So here's the first lesson that the news industry has mostly not learned, 10 years later: When a revolutionary technology comes along that will have a major impact on your business, reallocate enough resources to R&D such that entrepreneurial competitors won't get the first-starter advantage to themselves. There's still time to get this one right, because significant new technology developments continue to arrive with regularity.

The lessons of Prodigy, et al

The other important thing going on in 1993 and 1994 was the growth of proprietary online services: Compuserve, Prodigy, Interchange, Delphi, Apple's eWorld and (last but not least) America Online. Prior to the introduction of Mosaic and the commercialized Internet, these online services had been growing handily. Growth continued until it became obvious that the open Web was going to win this contest. The best the proprietary online services could do is open up links for their paying subscribers to get to the open Internet -- rather than be boxed in by the confines of a specific online service.

Carlson points out that the online services made some critical mistakes. The obvious one was realizing too late that it was a bad strategy to remain an island. Let's say you were a Prodigy subscriber in 1993. If you wanted to talk to other people online, they also had to be Prodigy members. The same went for other proprietary online services. With the exception of AOL -- "they built a better mousetrap," says Carlson, and remain an entry ramp to the Internet for millions of new online users -- this was a part of the online services' undoing.

The early services didn't always understand that what users wanted most was to communicate with each other -- via e-mail, discussion forums and online chats. (Prodigy even started charging subscribers extra for sending more than a few e-mail messages a month -- a ploy that backfired badly.) What people most wanted were the communications features. And they wanted the ability to talk with people anywhere online, not just on the service that they belonged to.

Some newspaper companies between about 1992 and 1995 were partners with the proprietary services, putting online versions of their newspapers on them in exchange for a share of the services' subscriber revenues. But slowly they slipped away from the services when it became obvious that the Web was the real thing -- and the future home of all online newspapers.

A still-largely-unlearned lesson comes out of the proprietary service era: That published content online isn't nearly as powerful as the communication between people that the online medium facilitates. E-mail and chat were consistently the features that were most popular in the early days -- not news stories published online. Most news companies still don't grasp this.

The news industry could make amends by embracing the concept of "citizen journalism," the idea of giving the audience a means to publish and not just professional journalists. The popularity of blogging (a.k.a., Web logs) is testament to the power of citizen publishing. There is a place for this in the news industry -- but most news executives haven't made this leap of faith yet.

Carlson suggests that where the news industry makes its biggest mistake is in failing to create services that are personally useful to people. E-mail; instant messaging; e-commerce; package tracking. It's no easy task, but the news industry still needs to figure out how to offer online services that are as personally useful as those.

Shovelware, revisited

Back in 1993, content on newspaper online services and the few Web sites that existed was mostly "shovelware" -- that is, taking articles and (occasionally) photos prepared for the newspaper and republishing them online. Of all the observations of 10 years ago vs. today, Carlson says the continued reliance on shovelware is his biggest gripe about online newspapers.

"I expected there to be a lot more original news content for the Web by now than there is," he says. It's not that shovelware content is bad -- it's a necessary part of any news site -- but original, compelling content that draws people to the online medium is what will cause the Internet to take off. There's not enough of it, still.

Looking back, Carlson cites msnbc.com, nytimes.com and usatoday.com as the leaders in Web-produced content in the early days -- and they're still some of the dominant names in original content. Not enough publishers have made similar commitments to original content, even though they've had a decade to do something. To be fair, we can point to a number of larger news organizations that have put some resources into online-original content, but small and medium sized ones mostly remain stuck in shovelware mode. There are too few newspaper sites like LJWorld.com that spend the money on online-original material.

Carlson's first foray into online newspapering was in Albuquerque, N.M., where he was the originator of The Electronic Trib, the once-bulletin board system (BBS) and later Web service of The Albuquerque Tribune. One of the early ideas back then was publishing news content online that did not make it to the paper: all wire stories received by the paper, for example. That's still a good, often untapped idea a decade later, he suggests.

Newspaper Web sites of old had somewhat of an excuse for not investing more time and money in original content. A decade ago, everything you did online was new; there weren't systems you could purchase or models you could copy from others. The online-news pioneers made it up as they went. That meant creating new technology solutions as new publishing challenges came up. Time and effort went much more into the technology than the content. Today, news executives don't have that excuse. It's time they step up to the plate and bat for the fences when it comes to online-original content.

The wire service model

In 1993, online newspapers typically published the news once or twice a day -- at roughly the same schedule as the print edition. That's largely changed. We're now publishing throughout the day, whenever news happens. News sites act much more like wire services when it comes to publishing the news than like newspapers.

But Carlson notes that this sea change hasn't hit the entire newspaper industry yet. Some small and medium-sized newspaper sites still publish once a day -- perhaps posting important news at other times, but mostly not. If you don't live in a big city, you probably have observed this behavior from your local newspaper.

Ten years later, a good number of newspapers publish online up to the minute. But too many remain stuck in the past of set deadlines. It's well past time for a change.

It's also about community

The early days of news online also demonstrated the importance of online community. Services operating in 1993, like the Fort Worth Star-Telegram's StarText and Albuquerque's Electronic Trib, cultivated strong community ties between paying subscribers. They hung out in discussion areas often based on common interests. StarText staff even organized in-person parties for members, so many became offline as well as online friends. Carlson remembers the Electronic Trib community even resulting in a marriage.

Ten years later, that small-town feel of newspaper online services (even when operated in a large physical city) is pretty much gone. This is something we might want to get back. The online medium is good at getting people of like interests together. News organizations should keep this in mind now, just as some of the pioneers did in 1993.

Where are the public records?

Another early idea that people like Carlson thought would be popular with news sites was researching, collecting and publishing public records online. The news industry tried a bit of this early on, but then stepped aside to let public agencies get data online. To be sure, in 2003 we have a wealth of public records available online from government agencies. But what we don't have, for the most part, is a serious effort by the news industry to publish public records in ways that use the interactive and multimedia capabilities of the Web to put the data in context, and to explain it.

Perhaps the problem here is similar to that of creating original online content: News executives haven't been willing to spend the money.

Where are the Drudge clones?

Not that he'd wish for more people just like Matt Drudge, but Carlson also is surprised that there aren't more highly successful online-only news personalities by now. Ten years into the Internet, you'd think we'd have a few more online journalists in the newspaper industry that are as visible and highly trafficked as Drudge.

I think there are several reasons for this, including the aforementioned continued dearth of original content. If newspaper companies aren't willing to commit the resources, then obviously there won't be many high-profile online stars.

This is starting to change, thanks to blogging. Web logs, of course, are very much about individual personalities. Today's most successful bloggers were unknowns a couple of years ago. A star system has developed in which the best bloggers gain celebrity status. Mainstream journalists follow the bloggers to stay on top of trends.

Blogging, if co-opted sufficiently by the newspaper industry -- and that's starting to happen -- can introduce a new wave of online personalities. Early in the news-blogging era, we've mostly seen journalists take on blogs. People like Dan Gillmor of the San Jose (Calif.) Mercury News, a technology columnist and popular blogger, is not only well known locally for his print column, but also has a serious global reputation as a leading technology observer and critic because of his blog. But journalists should be only part of the equation. What's needed is for news companies to also cultivate blogging talent from outside of their newsrooms. Perhaps the next Matt Drudge will work for a newspaper site.

Recording history

Looking back 10 years in the online-news industry is fascinating. Here are a few 1993 tidbits from Carlson's Online Timeline:

* Only a dozen or so newspaper online services were in existence; audio-text systems were 20 times more numerous at newspapers. (Today, it's the extremely rare bird that doesn't have a full-fledged Web site; audio-text is a minuscule business for newspapers now.)

* Then-U.S. president Bill Clinton became the first head of state to send an e-mail message, and the White House first went online. (Today, WhiteHouse.gov serves as the political mouthpiece of the Bush administration. Meanwhile, online political activism has blossomed, with millions of dollars being raised online by advocacy groups hoping to influence elections and elected officials.)

* 117 countries were reachable by e-mail. (Now, e-mail is ubiquitous throughout all but the most remote parts of the globe. It's as important to most people today as the telephone was in 1993.)

* There were about 200 Web servers in the world. (Today, many millions.)

As important as the online-media developments of 1993 were, it's odd and disconcerting to note that there's not much of a historical record of what those days actually looked like. Most newspaper Web sites of the mid 1990s were so busy developing their systems and getting news published online that they didn't archive screen shots of their day-to-day publishing.

Carlson does have a modest personal collection of screen shots from early news sites, BBS systems and venues on proprietary online services on his Online Timeline. It's worth some time to look at what he's got, to see just how far we have come. (And if you have images from the early days of online news, Carlson would like to receive copies. He can be reached at gigabit@ufl.edu.)

But Carlson and I agree: The industry hasn't come nearly far enough.