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Reality Bytes
Oppenheimer, associate editor of Newsweek Interactive, covered the Spotlight conference for its producer, Denise Caruso. His complete report can be found on Spotlight's Website at http://www.conferences.infoworld.com
Is the new electronic media industry booming or going bust? For readers of the news it's hard to tell. One day, high-tech businesses are faltering and the Internet's choking on its own traffic; the next day, business pages are fawning over yet another "interactive media" offering. In fact, as this issue goes to press, several of new media's biggest players (including Microsoft, Yahoo!, and America Online) are blitzing the countryside with on-line regional "publications." These are now running or soon will be in thirty-plus cities, including New York, Washington, Boston, Los Angeles, San Francisco, even Paris, Madrid, and Sydney. So far, these regional ventures are trying little more than an old media trick - entertainment and service guides that skim the cream from their print newspaper competitors. As they jostle for position, many are expected to die.
In the meantime, what's a poor journalist to do? If you're in management, should you commit big money to a risky venture of your own? If you're a reporter, should you rush to build electronic skills, even jump ship to a growing new media venture?
I'll argue that it's time for a collective deep breath. Despite their boosters' claims to the contrary, most players in electronic media seem to be nervously treading water right now. This was evident at a recent two-day conference on the "interactive media world" - a pricey, private, and unusually exclusive gathering of technology leaders, one which offered that rare glimpse of an industry candidly talking to itself. The conference (called "Spotlight") focused on the need to build "community" in the electronic world - and on the challenges of "creating, distributing, and selling new media products." It was produced by Denise Caruso, a New York Times new-media columnist, for InfoWorld Conference & Media Group, which organizes conferences for executives in the computer industry. The speakers, and the sold-out crowd of more than 300, were top names in the interactive media business. Yet much of what was shown was surprisingly thin and much of what was said was discouraging.
The conference opened with a presentation by Bran Ferren, chief scientist and creative R&D
vice president at Walt Disney Imagineering. Ferren, known for his deliciously acerbic humor, began by recalling how much he used to hear fellow new-media drinkers at after-hours bars talking about making a killing with various upcoming ventures. This year, he kept hearing terms like "shake-out," and lines like "I can't believe it cost $10 million to make this." Ferren called most of the current forms of new media "terrible," in both design and organization. They're particularly insensitive to people's time and money, he said, and the qualities that will get people to part with both those assets.
Even with design improvements, Ferren noted that a serious roadblock remains - for both small goals, like cooler digital gadgets, and big ideas as well, about news or other information. The culprit: limited "bandwidth," the techno-term for the phone and TV wires that run to homes and businesses, and which are far too thin to carry the industry's ambitious dreams. Ferren's concern is widely echoed by leaders such as Microsoft czar Bill Gates.
In the meantime, Ferren begged, "Please, don't try to solve problems we don't have. Don't try to replace the book. The book works very well. If you've ever tried to read one on a screen, you'll find it doesn't work very well."
Linda Stone, director of Microsoft's "Virtual Worlds Group," then talked about the relationship "between the computer and you." Stone believes "the soul of cyberspace is people-to-people communication." She pursues this vision by trying to improve the world of "chat" - live on-line conversation, mostly through typing, which often produces dialogue that is stunningly inane. During the questions that followed her ten-minute talk, Stone was asked not about people's relationships to their machines, but how to make money at this. "Everyone is trying to figure that out," was her reply.
Throughout these sessions, the audience remained unimpressed - until shown a CD-ROM of Leonardo da Vinci's sketches and notes. The old Italian manuscripts are nearly illegible, so, the CD's developer (Curtis Wong of Corbis Corp.) said, "We created something called the codascope." He then clicked his computer mouse, and a wide bar opened on the screen, instantly translating the Italian between the bar lines into English in a readable modern typeface. As the bar moved up and down the page, or across, it seamlessly translated the text. Throughout the room there was instant applause.
This led to a session on "the latest, greatest creative tools," which turned out to be a little less than that. There was a new approach to chat, which lets people represent themselves by choosing a moving icon called an "avatar" (a skull, for example, or a bird or demon). Sound, while fuzzy, is included, letting you talk with your chatting partner through the computers' microphones and speakers. Hmmm. We also saw an Internet cartoon show, proving that, for the average user, video is still jerky on the Web; some rich sound demonstrations by RealAudio; and, finally, a graphic method of organizing Web sites called "Project X," created by Apple Computer. The program converts your choices into little floating bubbles, arranged in colors and sizes that illustrate their descending order of priority. Wow.
Finally came a speaker who was supposed to answer the question people kept asking: "Can Anyone Make Money in Interactive Media?" According to the program, Mike Slade, president and c.e.o. of Starwave Corp., a broad-based interactive media company, would say "yes" and tell how. But on the podium, he wasn't particularly optimistic. First, he said, we have to define the interactive market. His answer: "Geeks rule - so far." Nearly two-thirds of Web ad revenue is computer-related, he said. Yet computers and office equipment generate only 2 percent of advertising expenditures nationwide, with on-line advertising comprising a mere 0.1 percent. Is Slade's firm making money? Denise Caruso asked. Slade swallowed, looked down, then said, "I can't talk about my company, but I would be surprised if there was a profit-making content venture in this room."
Day one closed with an energetic industry critique by Nick Donatiello, president and c.e.o. of Odyssey, a market research firm. Donatiello offered two principles for new media: first, technology must be much easier to use than the Internet is now. "A television is easy to use. You plug it in, you turn it on and it works." Second, it must be driven by the market (i.e., readers), not by the producers. "I am so tired," Donatiello said, "of hearing people say, ‘At our company, we produce products that we ourselves like to use.' Well, that's great. I hope you and your five friends have a wonderful business."
On the final day, four leaders gathered to discuss "Experimentation and Collaboration in New Media." And, once again, what emerged were surprisingly tiny ideas. One panelist showed how people can use his site to share information on-line (this is new?); a representative from a digital photo shop talked about the legal and copyright support they offer photographers; someone from a venture capital firm claimed to invest earlier in the creative process than most.
The last session of the conference was called "Creating Addiction: Where Plot and Games Converge" - a discussion hinting that still more radical changes are coming to the hallowed art of storytelling. What counts in "creating addiction" is experience, not plot, argued Mike Sellers of the 3DO Company. The best experiences, he said, emphasize "interpersonal interaction" (the "meaningful" sort, not just shooting people) and the environment (activities and themes) rather than the plot. Sellers's ultimate goal was noteworthy: after people have played 3DO's games, he hopes they'll have learned something about their place in society and who they are, and something about a larger history and culture.
The question is whether new media will consistently meet this standard anytime soon. Norman Pearlstine, editor-in-chief of Time Warner Inc., the lone traditional journalist who spoke at Spotlight, noted that "There are larger and larger numbers of players in new media for whom journalism isn't a particular interest," adding, "I hardly ever hear discussion of the public interest when I'm at gatherings of people in new media."
But Barry Diller, former head of Fox, Paramount Pictures, and QVC, and now chairman of Silver King Communications, in the closing speech of the conference, did address the public interest. "Archivists estimate that the collective sum of all printed knowledge is doubling every four years. More information has been produced in the last thirty years than in the previous five thousand," he said. "And it's only getting faster and more out of control.
"Information without knowledge. On the surface it provides convenience and promises new possibilities. But without discipline, it is more destructive than progressive. Since 1978, capital investment in information technology has increased 10,000 percent. In that same time, net productivity hasn't much changed. ATMs have increased bank fees, electronic filing has led to fraud, Jiffy Lube has replaced the relationship with a trusted mechanic, and twenty-four-hour customer service only works in a world of diminished service expectations.
"Then there's the media," he continued. "It used to be that there was a cadence, a rhythm to things. It would take a reasonable length of time for an event not only to get known, but to play out - for the consequences and the analysis and the understanding to incubate. Today, everything is available instantly. It's all about being on the scene, in real time. The problem is, getting to the scene quicker doesn't make us smarter. Information is not synonymous with knowledge. One is about facts, the other about understanding."
Diller urged the industry to take chances again, and try to create a truly new medium instead of just filling the Internet with old ones - books, magazines, TV, maybe movies, stuffed on-line or into CD-ROMs and thereby made "‘interactive,' whatever that means." Instead, Diller urged media makers to "subordinate your media expertise instead of imposing it," to let old and new media mix as they will. "The new world order of convergence will demand it. And those who are willing to play in it, on its own wildly unique terms, fortunes won or lost, will have a great and joyous time being present at the creation."
Looking back over the three years that I've been attending such conferences, I was shocked at how extensively the energy and goals in new media seemed to have shrunk. In 1993, when this industry had just caught hold, what drove events like this were big visions like Diller's, full of creativity and social redemption. Yes, those notions were largely unproven; in fact, in the early days, technologists seemed to draw funding and customers largely by selling people on what was in their own imaginations. By now, most of those visions have become symbols of an embarrassingly elusive utopia.
Conference producer Caruso, interviewed afterwards, was not discouraged by the industry's struggles. "It's an industry in its infancy," now suffering from "premature commercialism," she said. "Everyone knows there's not a business model yet. People are trying to find their way." What happened to yesterday's energy and vision? "That was the hype. Now the reality has begun to settle in. People are realizing it isn't a magazine on-line, it's not a book on-line, it's not a movie on-line. It's its own thing. People are still trying to figure out what it is."
How does a journalist fit into something that isn't yet a coherent "it"? If you're a news executive, particularly of a newspaper, you may have little choice. Hordes of journalists manqué are busy eating your lunch. You have to belly up to the table, ready or not, if only to save your side dishes (a.k.a., classifieds, entertainment information, display advertising). If you're a reporter, however, maybe it's time to sit down and remember who you are.
Journalists might benefit from beginning to think about how to tell stories differently someday - with audio, with video, with Internet links or animations. But for the coming few years, our old values seem more necessary than ever: namely, a sense of what's news, a commitment to the public interest, and an eye for the truth. The new-media industry won't be truly ready for us for a while.
