*The Integrated Newsroom - Literature Review*

2.5 PRODUCT: Characteristics of online newspapers

It [journalism] has failed to grasp, embrace or make use of highly effective new interactive technologies to be more relevant, creative and attractive. ... Traditional newspaper journalism remains our dullest medium, uglier than magazines, more constricted than the Net or the Web, less timely than cable news channels and online services.

(Jon Katz in Kees 1999)

Katz made this harsh criticism of journalism and newspapers when he spoke to a group of journalism and technology educators at a Freedom Forum gathering in San Francisco in 1999. However the WWW alternative has not been spared of criticism. Ben Compaine, Professor of Telecommunications at Temple University, USA, says that local newspaper web sites are primarily static for 24 hours, with the only compromise being perhaps some Associated Press (AP) news wire updates (Lasica 1997, p.48).

In support of online journalism Pavlik and Sagan espouse the mantra, "If you build it, they will come." It originates from "Field of Dreams" starring Kevin Costner, which focussed on a farmer building a huge baseball field in the middle of nowhere believing that players from all over would arrive to use it. Harper (1997, p.189) suggests that today the mantra should focus on reality and not dreams and instead be rephrased, "Build it well and make it easy. Otherwise they will not come." Pavlik and Sagan believe that increasing numbers of the world's WWW users are going online for their news. Users refer to the WWW as a library with its main plus point being the massive news content it provides for free (1997, pg, 30). They argue that sophisticated users recognise that the quality of news online is as high as that of leading newspapers, news magazines, TV or radio outlets, because much of it originates from those media. They state that the best national news sites are those that, along with repackaging or "re-purposing" their regular print content, offer original material designed specifically for the Web and cite The New York Times' Cyber Times as an example of a successful original online news content provider (ibid).

Debashis Aikat of the University of North Carolina notes that newspapers and other news media were beginning to understand how the Internet can provide "value-added involvement". Aikat cites several Web sites that are experimenting with non-traditional formats to attract younger consumers who may want to view information differently. The Chicago Tribune, for example, has constructed its site to look more like a computer-game screen than the front page of a newspaper (Jerding, 1998). Aikat's 1997 study of Philadelphia Online revealed that the introduction of interactive features, particularly local content may have caused an increase in web traffic. On 3 March 1997, the paper had a million hits in a single day for the first time, which could be attributed to reader interest in sports, classifieds and the introduction of "Web Video", a section displaying video clips of breaking news stories. Two months later, the introduction of an easy to use searchable database of information on movies, music, television and theatre in its entertainment section produced a surge of visits to the site (Aikat 1998, p.106 - 107). Aikat's findings concur with Harper's view, in that presently many news and information providers are not using the medium effectively. He argues that publishers should build their sites well and make them simple to use and adds the WWW's status will improve excessively when it begins to offer the typical user the same reliability of other media (1998, p.189).

Besides experimenting with technology in an attempt to cater to audience's needs, newspapers around the world, especially America, have taken to the 'portal' strategy. The term, 'Internet portal' first emerged around 1997, initially describing an "entryway" or the first page a WWW user encounters before plunging into a website. However portals evolved when websites such as Yahoo! And Excite who were primarily search engines, began adding features to their site in an attempt to keep users within their site instead of allowing them to slip away (Ledbetter 1999). Online newspapers have welcomed this strategy and are beginning to introduce free e-mail access, web listings, searchable online archives and ecommerce features. This strategy has two aims; to accumulate as many visitors as possible and to keep them at the site for as long as possible (Ledbetter). However, Columbia Journalism Review's James Ledbetter warns that it is not a proven strategy. Major players such as Disney have not seen a significant growth in its online audiences. He cites USA Today and The Wall Street Journal who have not developed a portal but are successful. There is a potential threat to quality journalism as important news could be ignored for sex, sports and violent stories in an attempt to boost readership, he adds.

Plagiarisation and misappropriation of WWW content are emerging concerns for news organisations. Suck, a daily column on the WWW, exposed an attempt by the Time Warner media empire to duplicate their site. Suck discovered the latter's Pathfinder site was constructing a look-alike site but had left its prototype open to the world, as Suck demonstrated by publishing their URL. "This was guerrilla journalism at its best, evidence that the Internet had spawned a new class of journalistic outsiders and armed them to outdo the greatest media operations with no more than a computer [software] and an Internet connection". Though the WWW has made information and news widely accessible, publishing online is equally simple for those with the skills and equipment. Publishing online requires nothing more than a modem, literacy, and something to say. This has implications for the standards of the content. "Getting into print in traditional media usually requires some sort of journalistic apprenticeship or education, where keen young writers are indoctrinated in the rules of journalism's ethics. Ethical niceties rank in priority somewhere below hard-disk crashes in the online world" (The Economist 1999, p.80 - 81).

Ethics on the WWW is likely to develop into a major cause of concern as the medium is entirely digital in nature, since images, HTML and text are easily and quickly duplicated. This process is facilitated by the WWW browser's "View Source Code" feature allowing users to examine a web site's HTML source code and being able to easily copy and modify these codes for personal use. This is aided by the fact that most images on the WWW have a small byte size as they need to be loaded quickly making it convenient for images/photographs to be copied.

At the time of writing, two significant legal battles involving trademark infringement and domain names includ France's Leonardo/Science Network versus Transasia Corporation and the eToys (a large online toy retailer) versus etoy.com (an established Internet art group) cases. Transasia Corporation and co-complainants filed a lawsuit in December 1999 against the Association Leonardo/Science Network for trademark infringement on use of the word "Leonardo" after Transasia trademarked Leonardo, Leonardo Finance, Leonardo Partners, Leonardo Invest and Leonardo Experts. "Leonardo" is in fact a scholarly journal the network has produced since 1968 and is now published by the MIT Press of Cambridge, Massachusetts (Leonardo Online 2000).

In a similar lawsuit, eToys described as "the largest online toy retailer" (in business since 1996, using eToys.com since 1997), is preventing etoy, an Internet art group (founded in 1994), from using etoy.com, which they have used since 1995. etoy.com an established group has been featured in many art books and countless articles about art (RTMark Online 2000). Probably to avoid such legal tussles, AOL and Time Warner acquired 21 variations domain names which may be useful to the new company prior to their merger (USA Today Online 10 January 2000). This demonstrates a trend of increasing importance corporations are beginning to place upon branding, identity and their image on the WWW. Academics such as Rhonda Breit (Deakin University) and Professor Brian Fitzgerald (Southern Cross University) are exploring these emerging areas as copyright laws are being re-written and adapted to new media (Quinn pers comm, 10 December 1999).

Product Success Story: The New York Times Online

Arthur Sulzberger Jr. chairman and publisher of The New York Times Co., outlined his nine steps for newspaper survival at the Ad-Tech conference in San Francisco in May 1999 (Stone 1999) He said critical factors were:

Listening to creative ideas, implementing change and embracing them
Adhering to the news company's core principle of good journalism, in this case their motto, All the News That's Fit to Print
Delivery and speed is equally important to users as the content
Providing free information to users; more than one million of its seven million registered users are non-US, increasing the site's hit rate tremendously. The paper is placed in the top 100 of the most trafficked sites on the Web
Keeping users glues to their site. Sulzberger cited expanded original content, updated breaking news, multimedia and e-mail updates resulted in visitors spending up to 32 minutes at the site
Building its seven-million registered database well to exploit the medium by leveraging demographics anonymously to target advertising
Drawing a clear distinction between news and advertising
Timing is everything. Well-timed strategic alliances like cars.com and CareerPath have extended the newspaper industry's legacy
Finding new ways to differentiate itself and provide quality trustworthy information to its readers

Experiential learning by publishers, while not subject to the rigour of research provides an important indicator of probable success for online publications.