One of the main reasons for the recent explosion of Internet use among people who don't consider themselves particularly computer-friendly is the ease with which it connects people around the world who have common interests. Journalists are no exception to this, as the sampling of experiences that follows illustrates.

Listening to the Lists

Here's a frightening academic certainty: somewhere, someone on some college campus is trying to understand journalism by analyzing journalism discussion lists on the Internet. This is like seeking to analyze the Italian Renaissance by sending spaghetti to a lab.

 These J-lists deal with but do not equal journalism. Still, they are spreading. Basically, they mechanically distribute participants' posts, or comments, to subscribers' e-mail addresses. The ensuing dialogues can be prone to irrational excess and vacant conjecture, to the misdirected stab, the startling backlash, the wandering conclusion. And they can be useful and stimulating.

A confession: I skim, sometimes pore over, and occasionally contribute to these lists. SPJ-L (formed for the Society of Professional Journalists), Journet (journalism educators), and IRE-L (Investigative Reporters and Editors) are among my favorite hangouts. Gaps in my mailbox are plugged by NPPA-L (National Press Photographers Association), an open-records forum called FOI-L, and a couple of broadcast lists.

Most days on these lists are placid, devoted to quiet discussions or to mundane searches for news leads or background. Other days, the zeitgeist is more surreal. Watching January's Chung-Gingrich controversy on the lists I follow was like watching an anaconda swallow a goat. Word that Newt's mom had been Connied (or, through a different lens, that Chung had been Mommed) broke on a Wednesday, and reaction bloated SPJ-L through the weekend.Three weeks later, the last posters finally said
 good riddance.

Even in Chung-free periods, mailstorms often clog the lists. The "owner" of CARR-L, a computer-aided reporting list he considers a "virtual newsroom," has recently chided gassy subscribers. When two students posted term papers to IRE-L, some applauded but others flamed.

For me, on-line debates about journalistic practice can inspire classroom discussions, connect me to old friends in the trade, and supply ideas and contacts. Here are a few lessons the J-lists have taught me.

1) People who are well organized in seeking information get strong, useful responses. People who ask bonehead questions don't.

2) Subscribers who aren't journalists care passionately about how journalists think and work, and sometimes bring more reason to
 the table.

3) Certain contributors are willing to appear rude, naive, or bigoted if it helps them make points or clarify issues.

 4) To carry a half-cooked idea or an overstuffed ego onto a journalism list is like paying a visit to Hannibal Lecter in bikini briefs.

5) You can't read everything ever posted. Cut your losses. Get a life.

Jim Upshaw

Jim Upshaw (jupshaw@oregon.uoregon.edu), a former network television reporter, teaches journalism at the University of Oregon's School of Journalism and Communication.

Down in the Well

The on-line world is full of reporters doing what reporters do: assembling research, finding things to read, wasting time, cultivating sources, floating trial balloons, complaining about editors, following paper trails, moonlighting, sniping at the competition, and hanging out. I hang out at The Well, an electronic conferencing service connecting more than 11,000 subscribers to the Internet and each other from a base in Sausalito. (It began as an offshoot of the Whole Earth Review; Well stands for Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link). At any given moment it has hundreds of conferences on thousands of topics. I hang out in three of them, Media, Writers, and Byline.

 Every Well habituŽ, journalist or not, has a different response to the question of why he or she returns day after day. I fell into The Well in 1993 while researching a magazine story. The source I was tracking down had moved on, but by the time I figured that out, I was hooked. Within six months I had logged my first hundred-dollar month. The service's intimacy and camaraderie are qualities that I find appealing: camaraderie, because the medium brings a spectrum of interesting, opinionated people to your desktop; intimacy, because, after all, it's just you and your computer, alone in a room somewhere.

 The Well acquired its cachet as a national media forum only in the last year or so. Its Media conference is an issues-and-arguments kind of place where, as one regular puts it, "Minds are actually changed; people learn." It can be tough, too. At the other end of the scale is the Writers conference, which Whole Earth's founder, Stewart Brand, describes as "endlessly kind." Compared to Media, Writers is a genteel salon, where we cheer large and small successes and console each other after failures. Byline, a hybrid of the two, was started earlier this year, mostly to discuss how to earn a living as a writer. Topics focus on business practices, who pays what, and "When Editors Say _______ They Really Mean _______."

Well conferences often drift off topic, sometimes delightfully. A discussion on journalists and cyberspace I started a while ago in Media rambled through a week-long debate on how reporters really work on-line, then turned into a conversation on the myth of objectivity, and then disintegrated into a discussion of whether calling someone a fuckhead could be considered an ad hominem attack. Finally, someone asked, "Well, if we've got that one sorted out, can we work on what is ad feminem?" Someone answered, "It's those commercials on TV that never say precisely what the product is used for." That's what keeps bringing me back to The Well.

Lisa Greim

Lisa Greim (lisa@well.com) is a Denver writer and cohost of the Rocky Mountain West conference on The Well.

The Sting of Cybercriticism

The weirdest moments for me at the virtual water cooler come when one of my own articles comes up for discussion. Last year I had a long piece in The New Yorker, and I admit that during the entire process of producing the piece I wondered how it would fly in the extremely active colloquoy devoted to that magazine in The Well's Media conference, one of the forums where I hang out. Though the piece was well-received almost everywhere, I was stunned to find some of my fellow Well-heads trashing it on-line, one of them in particular making remarks that would have been grounds for a fistfight had they been uttered to me directly. Since I was a presence in the conference, this harshest of critics must have known that I would read the remarks. I was thrown into a quandary -- should I attempt to defend myself against criticisms that, in my view at least, were so bogus that calling attention to them would have given them too much credence? I eventually decided to wait to see if someone else would defend me, and, indeed, someone did.

Later, I figured out that the appearance of the criticism in my own hangout had upset me a lot more than if I had received the same remarks in the form of a letter from a reader. On the other hand, that freedom-to-offend is a strength of The Well's culture. Without it, the discussions would be a lot less interesting, and I'd probably visit much less frequently.

 Steven Levy

Steven Levy (steven@echonyc.com) is a Fellow at the Freedom Forum Media Studies Center, a technology columnist at Newsweek, and the author of several books, most recently Insanely Great: The Life and Times of Macintosh, the Computer That Changed Everything.

Caught Up In the Web

The brochure advertised "an exciting and breathtaking 'fly-by' over The Strip at night," a helicopter ride over Las Vegas. I pressed a button and within a few minutes was looking down over more neon per square inch than I'd ever seen, pondering the obscene amounts of money being gambled away in the casinos below.

I've never been in a helicopter, I've never been to Las Vegas, and the adventure described above barely cost me a cent. I was in a library, actually, experiencing Virtual Las Vegas, a site on the Internet's World Wide Web maintained by Las Vegas's KLAS-TV. The site includes weather forecasts (including audio from the KLAS newsroom), entertainment schedules, a form for electronic comments, lots of neon-infested photos, and links to other news-related sites all over the country -- and all of this information is just a mouse-click away.

I've been spending a lot of time lately on the World Wide Web. If you haven't heard much about it yet, you will soon. Hundreds of newspapers and magazines -- as well as thousands of businesses and private individuals -- are racing to establish presences on this rapidly growing, multimedia-ready section of the Internet, which can be accessed with so-called "browser" software and a special type of Internet connection. In addition to its multimedia potential, which is unprecedented on the net, the Web's main innovation is its use of something called hypertext linking. What this means is that you need only to click on a highlighted word, phrase, or graphic to be transported to another spot on the same site or to a different site on another computer anywhere in the world.

When I sat down to do some Web-surfing as research for this piece, I intended to concentrate most of my attention on on-line magazines and newspapers (this magazine is about journalism, after all). For the first twenty minutes I was fine: I first checked out the San Jose Mercury News's impressively large and up-to-date Web site, then clicked myself over to Pathfinder, Time Inc.'s recently launched site, which includes areas devoted to People and Entertainment Weekly, among other publications. It was there that I started to get off-track: I followed a series of links until I found myself downloading Monty Python sound files from a home page (as a site's main screen is called) in Finland, and then visited an unofficial Snapple home page (which, like many of the more unusual home pages, is maintained by a fan -- in this case, a college student who scanned in labels of his favorite flavors). This non-linearity, which is inherent to the very concept of hypertext, can be slightly unnerving.

You can waste enormous amounts of time surfing on the Web -- though sometimes part of the fun is sifting through useless-yet-entertaining information. In five or ten years, the Web could be a boon for information seekers everywhere. Or it could also be just one more way for the world to amuse itself to death.

Andrew Hearst

Andrew Hearst (ignatius@echonyc.com) is cjr's editorial/production assistant.

A Window at the County Seat

On-line reporting used to be one of those things I knew I should learn someday, but the demands of covering Norristown, Pennsylvania, a depressed former mill town, always seemed to push computer literacy aside. Then, when a handful of Norristown gadflies started their own computer bulletin board, I was plunged into the on-line world.

 One forum on this bulletin board became a political battleground. Computer-literate Democrats began to trade stinging commentary on the forum, called the County Seat because Norristown is the seat of Montgomery County. They accused the Republican mayor, for example, of fostering illegal gambling rackets, protecting local slumlords, and ignoring corruption in the police department. My first clue that Norristown was being discussed in a parallel universe came when I walked into the mayor's office one morning and found him swearing and waving a sheaf of paper. The mayor, who doesn't own a computer and refuses to learn how to access County Seat, nonetheless had obtained a printout of recent discussions.

 These drive-by shootings on the information highway, and the mayor's initial inability to respond, were news, although the story had to wait a few days while I fumbled around with a modem. And the reporting presented issues I had never faced before. Before quoting directly from conversations I had to track individuals down to confirm that they had made the comments. Because it was a free, universally-accessible forum, my editors at The Philadelphia Inquirer and I eventually decided to treat the contents of the County Seat as a public record. We tried to screen out potentially libelous remarks.

Once I became familiar with County Seat I was astonished to find users encroaching on my job. Minutes of borough council meetings had been posted, along with the entire content of certain municipal ordinances and a swirl of invective, rumors, and tidbits. Instead of the Inquirer's culling this raw information for people, people were pulling it off-line for free. As time passed, however, these fears faded somewhat; it seems that people still count on the paper to sort and present vital information in an unbiased manner.

 I recently left the Norristown beat. When I trained my replacement, I gave her the usual tour of the town and a raft of phone numbers and leads. But I also spent an hour with her at the computer, teaching her to access the County Seat. It will be required reading.

Jere Downs

Jere Downs is a staff writer for The Philadelphia Inquirer. The County Seat can be found in the Far Point Station bulletin board via modem at 610-272-6244.

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