War: A Defining Moment for Net News

By: Steve Outing Every time there's a significant news event, the Internet gets a little stronger as a medium. And the bigger the event, the bigger the boost.

Sept. 11, 2001, obviously increased the stature of online news, but the industry wasn't quite ready then for as big of a boost as it got. Millions of information-hungry online users flooded news Web sites -- so many that the most popular sites' servers choked on demand. A year and a half ago, Web news wasn't quite ready for prime time (which in the Internet's case, is during work hours).

Now with the U.S. war on Iraq in full swing, the Internet is (mostly) there as a mass medium capable of meeting high public demand with quality coverage delivered efficiently. War coverage online has been fast, well planned, and there were no significant technological problems. This latest war has elevated the Internet to a status that early online news pioneers only dreamed about.

The Net has arrived as a news medium serving a mass-market audience. While there's still much work to be done, the Iraq war represents a significant online-news milestone.

An optimistic view

Since the U.S. and Britain invaded Iraq last week, I've been thinking about how the Internet fits into the coverage picture. In many ways, coverage on the Web by the largest news organizations -- CNN, BBC News, and MSNBC, especially -- got close to serving as a replacement even for breaking television news. If you were glued to your computer monitor last Wednesday night when the war officially began (and that would put you in a minority, still, of course), you would have been almost as up to date as if you were glued to your TV set.

Last Wednesday night found me sitting in front of the TV along with a laptop computer, simultaneously watching and listening to CNN and ABC broadcast reporting, and clicking around the world's top news Web sites. I found the Web component of my war-news consumption to be more satisfying, even on that first night. While TV anchors started repeating themselves and filling air time with their own theories when there was a temporarily lull of new information, the Web with its hundreds of available news channels offered a respite when TV news started to flounder.

Indeed, I found myself annoyed with the seemingly singular perspective of the major U.S. television network newscasts. I hungered for some alternative perspectives that TV failed to provide. If I was forced to choose between my TV or my PC for the duration of this war, I'd keep the computer. There's enough breaking-news video on the Web -- albeit not of broadcast quality -- that I wouldn't miss much, if anything.

This is not something I would have said until just recently.

'The Internet war'

My own view of the current state of online news is a little more upbeat about where we're at than some of the industry's top executives who I interviewed this week for a reality check -- but not by much.

"This war may well become known as an 'Internet war,' in the same way that World War II was a 'radio war' and Vietnam a 'television war,'" says Dean Wright, the recently appointed editor-in-chief of MSNBC.com, the news organization that's currently drawing the largest Web audience. "There's no question that online news is fully a part of the mainstream media and that millions of people turn to Internet news sites during breaking news events."

Wright is currently on a campaign to help people think of Internet news as mainstream. He'd like to banish the term "new media" when talking about online news. Online media deserves mainstream status, he says, because its biggest practitioners already are a direct competitor to TV news in big breaking stories like the onset of war.

"I think we're already there," he says. "We're delivering reputable information and breaking news to millions of online users."

MSNBC.com is clearly succeeding in providing an alternative to TV for a significant number of consumers. The site served up more than 6 million live video streams and on-demand video clips on the first night of the war -- up from an average of 500,000 a day in the days leading up to the conflict. MSNBC.com is still offering free video, while competitors like ABCNews.com and CNN.com now charge for access to streaming and on-demand video.

TV's repeating narrative: an opportunity

When an event of the magnitude of the 9/11 terror attacks or the crash of the space shuttle Columbia occurs, the initial attention will likely be on TV news -- for many more years to come. The consumer instinct is to turn on the TV to find out what's going on and see the first pictures.

But after those initial minutes, there's a great opportunity for online news, and we saw that with the onset of this war, says Kinsey Wilson, vice president and editor-in-chief of USAToday.com. "Viewers first turn to television in part because TV's strength is the delivery of a narrative story line. That's what people are looking for when an event like this first begins to unfold," he says. "Eventually, though, television starts to loop back on itself and repeats the narrative over and over again. I think that's where the Web gains a huge advantage. The best sites can move quickly to develop a story in multiple directions, add depth and detail, and give readers their own pathways to explore."

Wilson's point is dead on. Just because TV owns the first minutes (or hours) of major breaking news doesn't mean that Web news sites can't either steal back or share the attention of news consumers relatively quickly. Says Wilson: "I think television would still be the medium of first resort [if a 9/11-like episode occurred 20 years from now]. But the Web will be an increasingly important and perhaps persistent companion."

King at the office

As we've seen before, online news has been in the last week a formidable media force during office hours. "We are fundamentally reaching an audience at a time of day that no other medium is reaching them," says Christopher Schroeder, CEO and publisher of WashingtonPost.Newsweek Interactive. His washingtonpost.com has been one of the most serious contenders in providing TV-like speed of coverage of the war effort. "Television is a very powerful way of bringing visual drama to these astounding events. The Web is getting better at offering this type of experience, and we are able to bring it to the desktops of workers during the day, when they may not have access to television."

Schroeder continues: "As more and more folks have broadband access, as computer technology advances, and as Wi-Fi [wireless broadband Internet access] makes the Web more portable, Internet news will offer the same drama and immediacy as television."

Is it possible, then, than in a few more years the Web will become the "medium of first resort" for big breaking news events, eclipsing TV? Says Wilson, "As the pipe gets bigger, it'll be possible to fill the computer screen with video images. But will viewers be surfing the Web at that point or merely watching TV that happens to be on a different digital transport mechanism (TCP/IP)? It's always been my view that the Web is a distinct medium in its own right, and those who figure out how to truly play to that medium will command the biggest audience."

New forms of news content

Observers of online-news trends point to the growth in multimedia content as further evidence of the Web's maturation into a mass medium. Because the lead-up to this new war was so long, most major news sites had plenty of time to prepare for multimedia coverage once the war actually started. "This war was a case in which Web news organizations had months to think about what they would do when it happened," points out David Carlson, a media futurist and journalism professor at the University of Florida at Gainesville. "That, I think, led to some great material and so-called 'interactives' being available very quickly. Most breaking news events aren't like that."

But the Web's "unique" content is also why Internet journalists likely will never fully match the speed with which television can produce compelling pictures almost instantly of breaking-news situations. "As long as Internet journalists have to write or otherwise generate content beyond moving pictures with sound, we can't compete in those early minutes," Carlson says. "The TV guys just have to show up, turn on a camera and hoist a satellite dish. I'm not saying that's easy, but I am saying that it's faster than the technology Internet journalists have available to them now. When we have bandwidth and technology to create a 'wearable reporting suit' or something of its ilk, that may change."

Paul Grabowicz, director of the New Media Center at the University of California at Berkeley, says the Web remains mostly a complement to television and other media. Online can "better tell some stories," he says, by offering true multimedia presentations like interactive maps and Flash presentations.

But longer term, Grabowicz thinks the Web is likely to supplant other media -- "when true broadband is ubiquitous, and easy to use portable devices allow access anywhere, anytime." He expects young people to drive this eventual shift, because "digital technology is so much more a natural part of their lives." For now, he suggests, "the Web is just part of the media mix, albeit an increasingly important one."

The latest news

Not everyone agrees that the Internet has "come of age" as a news medium in the last week, as I'm suggesting. Most experts acknowledge that there remain significant evolutionary stages that the Internet must go through in order to "get there." The most obvious is that video quality on the Web remains poor.

"If something is so urgent that consumers must see what's happening immediately, they're not going to be patient enough to watch a poor-quality video that doesn't match up with the sound -- or click 'refresh' 10 times waiting to get that video stream from CNN.com," says Gordon Borrell, president of news new-media research firm Borrell & Associates.

Borrell thinks that the Internet came of age as a new medium during the U.S. election of 2000, because as the Al Gore-George Bush votes battle dragged on over several weeks, "the Internet provided the best way to see the latest election tallies. It wasn't quite as urgent as a war and didn't require video footage. But it taught us all -- especially during the workday -- that the Internet was a place where we could find out 'the latest' in an instant."

While I agree with Borrell's point about the election, I think this war represents an even more significant moment for online news. In the initial phases of the Iraq war, news sites have featured:

* Web-centric, well-planned, compelling multimedia content.

* Breaking-news headlines and video delivered at nearly the speed of television (at least for broadband users).

* An infrastructure that's now capable of meeting large-scale consumer demand for instant news.

We now have the content and the infrastructure in place for serious purveyors of Internet news to call themselves mainstream media. To my mind, it truly a defining moment.

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