SYDNEY SCHANBERG'S ONLINE EDUCATION

By: Wayne Robins As the Sun Sets On APBnews, He Says, Preserve Old-Line News Values
Online



The message on dozens of computer screens in the mammoth newsroom of
APBnews.com during the last week of June instructed: 'Press Ctrl + Alt +
Delete to log on.' But it went largely unheeded, even unread. The video
terminals looked like headstones in a computer graveyard. Only a tiny fraction
of journalists and technicians remained of the more than a hundred who once
filled the crime-and-justice Web site's football-field-size offices on lower
Broadway in New York.



APBnews.com has lived in the city's financial district, and it has been battered
by financial constraints. Having gained much respect and many accolades as a
niche Web site, it found its venture capital disappear in the tech-stock scare of
spring 2000.



Then, last week, APBnews.com announced it was filing for bankruptcy under
Chapter 11. 'Bankruptcy establishes a legal environment and process for new
investors to come in and maximize the return to creditors,'' said Joe
Krakoviak, a company spokesman.



Among the few who remain logged on, as APBnews.com executives hunt for
an angel, is Sydney Schanberg. Foreign correspondent, Pulitzer Prize winner
for his 'Killing Fields' articles about Vietnam and Cambodia (later turned
into an an award-winning movie), former metro editor of The New York
Times, ex-columnist for New York Newsday, and passionate
defender of truth, justice, and the Boston Red Sox in a society in which all
three are often under attack, Schanberg has another distinction: He is the most
widely known newspaper veteran to have joined a stand-alone Internet Web
site, and therefore, the first to feel it when the bottom fell out.



'My interest here was very closely defined,' he says at his desk by the wall of
a newsroom nearly devoid of people, but full of stacks of newspapers,
Freedom of Information Act documents, and moving boxes ready for
evacuation. One challenge was to pursue investigative work, unburdened by
the entropy and inertia of too many newspapers whose mission seems limited
to infotaining their readers. The other was to see if such online journalism
could energize newspapers, where Schanberg, now 66, has spent virtually all
of his 40-year career.



'One of the things I wanted to find out was whether the Internet could have a
positive influence on mainstream journalism,' Schanberg explains. Believing
that most news organizations hesitate to invoke their mandate to debunk
conventional wisdom and expose the sacred cows in their communities,
Schanberg wondered if enterprising stories that appeared on the Web would
force newspapers to follow up and follow through.



APBnews.com certainly gave them some incentive. In February, it won the
first National Journalism Award for Web Reporting from the Scripps Howard
Foundation. Then, in April, the site won a citation from the Investigative
Reporters and Editors organization for 'pioneering work to gather data and
post it on the Internet for the benefit of the public.'



Still, the answer to Schanberg's question about whether online journalism
could enliven the mainstream might still be no.



Last fall, he did an APBnews report questioning the publishing of transcripts
of videotapes of John Gotti and his family visits in prison, leaked to the New
York Daily News, perhaps illegally, by federal officials as a favor to
the paper. Schanberg, no shrinking violet when it comes to putting dastardly
do-badders on the spot, cringed at the irrelevance of the transcripts, the
humiliation of family members not charged with crimes, and the lax
journalistic ethics that permitted publication. But this angle was not widely
debated on 'Nightline' or on any major Op-Ed page.



It is this kind of strong moral backbone critique on which Schanberg bases his
own identity as a journalist. At APBnews.com he exposed a former 'Mr.
Clean,' New York Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly, as a member of the
oily Big Tobacco-paid private eye team collecting dirt on Brown &
Williamson Tobacco Corp. whistle-blower Jeffrey Wigand. And he
confronted the contradictions between Sen. John McCain's straight-talking,
war hero stature on the campaign trail and his refusal to discuss his role in
generating legislation that has limited public access to U.S. Defense
Department records about POWs and MIAs left behind after the Vietnam
War.



That Schanberg package noted that McCain's 'staunch resistance to laying
open the POW/MIA records has baffled colleagues and others who have
followed his career.' McCain's clout, he wrote, has resulted in 'literally
thousands of documents that would otherwise have been declassified long ago
[being] legislated into secrecy.' It is one topic that McCain has consistently
declined to discuss.



'This role that McCain has played has never been written about by the
mainstream press,' Schanberg observes. 'I was waiting, but there was not one
peep out of any mainstream newspaper.'



What this suggests to Schanberg is that online journalism has not yet been
given proper respect by the elders of the news business. 'They're still treating
the Web as an alternative publication, just the way The New York
Times treats The Village Voice,' Schanberg says. 'The
Times almost religiously and intentionally does not follow stories
The Village Voice discovers, no matter how fascinating the story may
be. It's a caste system that still hasn't gone away, and I think the Internet is
considered a lower caste by the mainstream.'



'Push' comes to shove



It was almost exactly a year ago when a mutual friend suggested Schanberg,
whose career achievements make him a Brahmin among mainstream
journalists, meet with Mark Sauter, one of the founders of APBnews.com.
Schanberg went to visit the new company's offices, then in a smaller space on
Maiden Lane, also near Wall Street.



'It had a lot of seductive qualities about it,' Schanberg recalls. White-haired,
wiry, and robust, Schanberg speaks with professorial authority about politics,
journalism, and the media. An occasional pontification is balanced by
subsequent self-deprecation. He knows what he knows, but he knows he
doesn't know it all - especially about Internet journalism - as he
talks about his first visit to APBnews.com.



'The room had too many people in it for the air conditioning, but it was a real
newsroom, with a lot of energy,' he explains. 'And they were using a
technology I wasn't familiar with. I love newsrooms, and there aren't many I
would want to work in. I talked to people, and when the tour was over, Mark
and [Executive Editor] Hoag Levins asked me what I thought. I told them I
was impressed with the newsroom sense of the place, but if they were asking
about myself, garden-variety crime wouldn't hold my interest very long. But if
they were interested in expanding it to the whole range of the criminal-justice
system - government corruption, civil crime, corporate crime, standards
and ethics, doing the right thing as opposed to doing the wrong thing -
then I'd be intrigued.'



What Schanberg had in mind, an idea that would dovetail his own interests
with the wide-open spaces of the Internet, was investigations, loosely defined.
And so it was with much fanfare that he joined APBnews.com last August as
editor for special investigations.



'Uncompromising editorial standards and our absolute dedication to building
the authoritative news source on crime, justice, and safety have allowed us to
attract journalists like Sydney,' Marshall V. Davidson, CEO and chairman of
APB Online Inc., boasted in a press release at that time. 'From the beginning,
we have hired veteran reporters and producers who understood the potential of
combining the editorial disciplines of top newspaper and television
newsrooms with the power of the Internet.'



APB Online had indeed hired a few top guns. Sauter, a co-founder and chief
operating officer of the company, is a former investigative correspondent for
'Inside Edition,' and Levins is a former executive editor for E&P.
Schanberg worked closely with Robert Port, a former special projects editor at
The Associated Press with a strong background in investigative reporting,
who was APBnews' senior editor for computer-assisted reporting.



But the investigative reporting team Schanberg had been promised was slow
to materialize, although APBnews had 55 full-time reporters among its staff of
140. 'None of this stuff ever gets done unless you dedicate people to it and
don't take them off, and they agreed,' Schanberg says. 'We didn't really have
an investigative team until fairly recently, the last couple of months. I had
some reporters who were allowed to work part time, and a lot who wanted to
be part of investigations, but most of the energy in this newsroom had to be
spent getting up a fresh story or adding something fresh to the site three times
a day, churning out the daily diet.'



The Web site's huge appetite for copy - 'pushes' for new or updated
stories all day - meant more dependence on telephones and computers
and less on the shoe-leather work that gives the best reporting its color,
immediacy, and impact. 'People found that confining, the lack of contact with
the human world, except by phone,' Schanberg says.



And yet Schanberg has nothing but praise for the quality of the reporters, the
mix of youth and experience, and the widely shared sense of mission that
characterized APBnews. 'As important as anything else, it was a very, very
civilized newsroom, with very little backbiting, almost none,' he says. 'Most
everyone had come from newspapers, most had good reporting skills and
wanted to learn more. For me, it was a blessing, because they knew more
about the Internet world, so I picked their brains and they picked mine.' And
there was, according to Schanberg, strict adherence to high reportorial
standards.



APBnews put special emphasis on uncovering government documents using
the Freedom of Information Act and posting revealing results on its Web site.
FBI files on people ranging from Frank Sinatra to Mike Royko were published
online - and nine months of effort allowed APBnews.com to extract the
financial statements of federal judges, a topic that certainly qualifies as the
public's right to know.



'The rule here,' he boasts, 'was that you had to confirm everything yourself.
You couldn't lift it from a newspaper or Web site or say, 'CNN reported. ... '
So the rules were very much old-fashioned traditional journalism.'



Swimming from Cambodia



Schanberg learned the 'traditional' way well, starting more than four decades
ago, well before the era of 'strategic partnerships' and 'Web business
models.'



He began his newspaper career as a copy boy at The New York Times
in 1959, after graduating from Harvard with a degree in government in 1955,
then serving in the U.S. Army. Working on local and national news beats
through the 1960s, he became a foreign correspondent for the Times in
1971, based in its New Delhi bureau during the war between India and
Pakistan over Bangladesh.



Southeast Asia became his passion. Schanberg spent much of the time from
1972 to 1975 covering the civil war in Cambodia, a fratricidal bloodbath that
left millions dead. His indispensible colleague was a Cambodian named Dith
Pran, a photojournalist who became Schanberg's translator. When the capital,
Phnom Penh, fell to the Khmer Rouge, Pran and Schanberg stayed, were
captured, and nearly executed. Schanberg won his Pulitzer Prize in 1976 for
his reporting on Cambodia for the Times.



The story of how Schanberg made his way out, thinking Pran was dead, and
their reunion after Pran's escape from starvation and torture in his homeland
was made into the movie 'The Killing Fields,' with Sam Waterston starring as
Schanberg. 'I do not see him much, but he is still my real brother,' Pran, now
a photographer for The New York Times, says today, referring to
Schanberg.



When he returned to the United States, Schanberg became metro editor of the
Times, and then a columnist. In 1986, Schanberg left the
Times to join New York Newsday, a new big-city edition of
the profitable and highly regarded Long Island newspaper Newsday,
as a columnist. Mark E. Willes, the now-disgraced former CEO of
Newsday's former parent Times Mirror Co., abruptly shut down the
New York paper in July 1995.



Ironically, New York Newsday's slogan was 'truth, justice, and the
comics.' APBnews.com's was 'crime, justice, safety.' New York
Newsday's bottom line offered Wall Street too little, too late;
APBnews.com has been undone by trying to be too much, too soon.



Beginning at the end



While Schanberg himself had little patience for standard cops-and-robbers
stories, or weird-wide-Web oddities such as 'some student in Ann Arbor who
microwaved his roommate's parrot,' APBnews.com was well-respected when
it started staggering in the second week of June, gaining praise from
magazines as varied as Brill's Content ('timely and informative') and
Entertainment Weekly ('its saving grace is its gravitas').



'We had a safety channel, celebrity channel, media channel - I think we
were hitting a lot of interest groups out there,' Schanberg points out. 'It was
nice that people recognized us. What we wrote about may not have interested
everybody, but it was quality journalism.'



But all the journalism prizes in the world won't keep a stand-alone media site
afloat if it doesn't have a workable business plan. Originally, Schanberg says,
the path to profit backed by free-flowing venture capital was a full-service
model. Among the haunting cul-de-sacs in APBnews' now-ghostly newsroom
is a small radio studio, complete with sound mixing boards and a soundproof
broadcast booth that looks, from the outside, like a very expensive Finnish
sauna.



'For a while, they were saying that would be the ideal plan, to be a full-

service Web site, and that's why they expanded into radio and television and
so forth,' Schanberg says. 'At least that's what the proprietors were being
told. That was the consensus four or five months ago.' Now, the belief system
du jour for media Web sites is 'Strategic Partnership' with a much larger
media company - the media site providing content that the strategic
partner can distribute in multiple mediums to a larger, already-existing
customer base.



'The conventional wisdom now is you should try to do these things in a very
incremental way, starting off in a shoestring fashion, not trying to become a
big media company right away,' Schanberg observes. 'Because with that kind
of budget, you're going to spend a million dollars a month, and you may not
be able to get that cash flow from advertising or whatever to support that. This
is all hindsight now, because we ran out of money.'



Newspaper Web sites, on the other hand, are now an essential element of the
business, Schanberg believes, whether they can ever draw profits on their
own.



'I think the idea is, even if you don't make money on it, you're drawing
attention to the paper and perhaps bringing more readership to the paper,
maybe leading to more information product - magazines, newsletters,
whatever - that somebody will pay for. In a way, it's like a loss leader.
You [the newspaper] have got to be there, because you have to learn about
this new methodology for conveying information.'



And Schanberg's newly discovered fascination with journalism on the Web
remains intact. 'I don't think we're at the end of anything, or in the middle,' he
says. 'I think we're at the very, very beginning. I just don't know where it's
going to go. Maybe if I had a better business sense I'd start devoting myself to
ideas to make money, but I don't think I'm going to do that. Because the
moment you start that, you come quickly to the places money is made, which
is the superficial stuff, ephemeral stuff, that's gone in a day. My goal is to
continue to do things that please me, that I think are good journalism.'





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Wayne Robins (wrobins@editorandpublisher.com) is an associate
editor for E&P. He covers new media for the magazine and E&P Online.









(c) Copyright 2000, Editor & Publisher