Tai-Li Wang (Editor: Veronique Autphenne)

More than 20 million Internet users in the United States - or more than half the country’s Internet users - now regularly log on to obtain news of the sort they used to get from print or broadcast outlets¹. In the past couple of weeks, the public’s interest in the White House sex scandal further pushed the average daily ‘page view’ to a new high figure. Major news stories now break on the Internet so often that the online newspaper has become a mainstream medium for news in the states.

Nearly 500 American dailies publish editions on the Webs. The conflict in newsrooms right now is that, are you going to make your online papers just a ‘continuation’ or copy of the mother papers? Some argued that online news sites should have soul and flesh of their own. Tom Regan, supervising editor of Christian Science Monitor Online, proposed a news system called Infosis to redesign the web site (Regan 1998). Regan supposes that Infosis system automates the production of the news pages so much that more time will be saved for creating online-original content, rather than massing print content to get it in shape for Web presentation.

Moreover, online news sites are beginning to make good use of revolutionary new interactive tools to pull larger audience. The new interactive news delivery options include the use of streaming video and audio streaming technology, the use of robot-like ‘avatars’ reading news at the sound of a voice command, using 3-D development software tools to explore a crime scene in more detail, or tracking how a bill becomes a law. For example, the New York Times on the Web (Cyber Times) is the first online paper to offer streaming (motion) video during its coverage of Princess Diana’s death. The technology is viewed as fairly new tool for those who seek to capture the flavor and texture of a news event. It allows users to watch news clips instantly at the click of a mouse, thus enhances the storytelling capabilities of online newspapers. Some sites used to offer the occasional QuickTime video, but that took a long download time, typically several minutes for just a 30-second clip.

Jim Kennedy, director of multimedia services of Associated Press, predicted that streaming video will become prevalent since the beauty of the Web is that it gives the ability to cover a story through print, photos, graphics, sound and video (Lasica 1997). However, due to the tremendous cost it may add to run a Web site, there is only a small proportion of online news with capacity to adopt the streaming video as a standard news tool.

Steve Ross, a professor at the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University, suggested using a computer coding language called JavaScript. JavaScript has been a popular software in PCs. It now is applied for online news readers to calculate numbers of things from taxes to a range of math problems (Ross 1998). For example, if you are reading a typical property tax story that focuses on how much more homeowners will pay, now you can produce a very quick JavaScript where readers can fill in the blanks—what are you paying now, what is the value of your house—that is what your taxes are going to be.

Some Internet promotion experts hold that, despite all the novel online strategies, publishing success on the Internet will still be achieved by true newspaper industry practices. The customer service, strong audience loyalty, solidly documented demographic and circulation data are the key to successfully selling advertising in any medium. The online newspaper even probably empowers the print parents to regain some advertising market share they have lost to local direct marketing companies, because in many cases the Web is a potent transactional medium and a direct marketing tool itself. Wester, director of Internet marketing strategies for the Yankee Group, outlined four types of cyber community that newspapers can attract: geographic, interest, circumstantial (a particular health ailment, for example), and transactional (banking, for example) (Miller 1998). Marketing strategies for promoting Web news sites by cyber ‘community’ are summarized in Figure 1.1. Online community strategies help increase a newspaper’s Web site traffic. For example, Total Sports tries to provide live cybercasts, such as shot charts for basketball, statistics or data, to attract the sports community. The sports model is also taken by other sports news sites which aim at drawing more women coming online by adding more women-oriented content, since a surprising community for the Web site are women, who as readers of the print paper have been declining in numbers (Sweetman 1997).

Some believe that content is still the key to create a brand name. Esther Dyson has a well said about the role an editor playing in determining the success of the online news content. ‘An electronic editor must be more an intellectual bartender than a chef. In the interactive world, the bartender does not do all the talking. The bartender knows who should talk to whom,’ says Dyson (Auletta 1996).

According to a recent audience reach², MSNBC on the Internet is the most heavily trafficked news site on the Web. However, the archrival CNN Interactive contends to have higher levels of ‘absolute page view traffic’ – another way to measure Web audience--than MSNBC. Some other news organizations take the ‘average daily circulation’ - that is, the average number of unique users—to measure Web traffic. The lack of a uniform measuring standard for online audience meets resistance from advertisers, and exists as a main obstacle when online newspapers are trying to make profits.

The Internet news usage behavior pattern is shaping up similar to broadcasting television in terms of weekly use, and is used more than cable television, newspapers and magazines during that same period of time³. The most important topics are local and national news, weather, and world news. Researchers also found that the Internet is preferred above other media as a source for financial news. Nearly one-third of online news consumers said they go online to get financial news.

The growing numbers of Internet users is certainly one of the most powerful driving force for the spectacularly accelerated growth in online newspapers. The computer-distributed news are believed to grab a significant share of the audience because it is even shifter than CNN Headlines News or all-news radio, where the news cycle has a twenty to thirty minute turnaround.

‘We want to create a legacy as grand as the earliest days of TV news, and we have a chance to invent something with no rules…’ said Merrill Brown, editor-in-chief of MSNBC’s online news operation (Hickey 1997). Like many other senior journalists who have been hired away from newspapers like Washington Post, Time or U.S. News, Brown is dedicated to giving online users a richer understanding of stories. They want to offer ‘personalized news’ of specific local interest that whose Web fans can not get on broadcast TV or cable.

Another reason for newspapers to go online may not sound journalistic-mission oriented but seem more practical and economic. As newspaper companies examine the challenges of changing technology and declining readership, they are moving in the direction of multiple outlets, going beyond acquiring radio and television stations to experiment with the Internet.

It gives newspapers a better chance to survive if they can provide the same material to more people through new technologies.

Online journalism is a quagmire of conflicting interests and new ethical dilemmas. The ethical criticism centered on issues like inaccurate and unbalanced reports due to the deadline pressure around the clock, plagiarism, or obscene languages in the chat rooms, etc. The debates over cyberspace journalistic ethics got further heated recently because of the White House sex scandal. The Wall Street Journal used its Web site overnight on 4 February to break a story alleging a White House steward saw the president and Monica Lewinsky alone in a room and that he later cleaned up tissues with lipstick and other stains on them. The story was immediately cited and put out everywhere, but later proved be inaccurate.

Regulators, scholars and media experts have been discussing these confusions for days, yet there has not a consensus or a drafting of a set of guidelines been made.

Many online newspapers envisage revenues coming from advertising, subscribers, and syndication of pieces. But the mystery is - who is actually reading the online news? On-line services lack a consensus of measurement standards of users, and often boast the numbers of ‘hits’ they receive. When a visitor clicks on the title page it is counted as a ‘hit’. So is each click on an article or a piece of art. Therefore, what does a ‘hit’ really mean to journalists and advertise remains a myth.

Many marketing experts launching online news sites hold that it is too early to charge. There are three reasons: technical, material, and spiritual. Michael Kinsley, editor-in-chief of Microsoft online magazine Slate, analyzed that first of all, readers can not give credit card numbers comfortably over the Internet. Moreover, it is hard for people to feel that they should pay real money for some thing that has no physical existence. It is even viewed by some as a violation of the ideology of the Web to charge for content in cyberspace. Despite of the debates, Slate took the first move to charge subscribers $19.95 a year. The move further heated the contention on the online charging issue.

However, the promise of online newspapers is deeply rooted in the digital culture of future world. In the old world of ‘atoms,’ physical limits preclude having both breadth and depth in the same volume. In the digital world, an online newspaper is as a collection of elastic messages, which can stretch and shrink in accordance with the reader’s action.

‘Ideas can be opened and analyzed at multiple level of detail…when you open the little electronic doors, you may see a different story line depending on the situation or, like barbershop mirrors, an image within an image within an image,’ commented Nicholas Negroponte, the director of the MIT Media Lab (Negroponte 1995:71).

Instead of reading what other people think is news and justify as worthy of the space it takes, users can consume every ‘bit’ in online newspapers according to their own interests and needs. On Monday morning, you go online for filtering information pertaining to business needs. On Sunday afternoon, you may enjoy with Art Buchwald or a crossword puzzle. This is The Daily Me. Probably it is one of the most essential promises online newspapers can count on in the future.