News.com:

It looks and sounds much like any morning story meeting, although this one's at a new-media outfit, news.com. From one side of the table: "I wonder if we can get video" of a news conference about a major new website. Over a speakerphone somebody describes another story, this one from the world of computer code, "about how the C++ development language is holding its own against Java."

 The stories produced here aren't for everyone, but a look at news.com (www.news.com), as it strives for credibility, attention, and profits, provides a snapshot of one version of online journalism as it takes shape.

 News.com's audience is made up of computer mavens who expect solid, original reporting on information-technology stories. Its editors select more than a dozen stories each morning that will be produced and posted on the Web, then updated for twelve all-news-radio-like deadlines into the evening.

Presiding at the meetings, in a converted loft in the "media gulch" section of San Francisco, is Jai Singh, forty, the soft-spoken editor. A former editor at Infoworld and PC Week who came to this country at nineteen, Singh leads a staff of thirty-four, including twenty-five reporters and editors, three of them based in Boston, the site's East Coast presence.

 When he arrived at news.com's parent company, CNET (pronounced sea-net), in January 1996, Singh says, the company's online news efforts consisted mainly of three people rewriting stories lifted from newspapers. He pushed, successfully, for more original reporting. To get it, he began recruiting experienced journalists from such places as the San Francisco Chronicle, the Los Angeles Daily News, and The Associated Press. Pay starts at around $25,000, Singh says, but climbs into the $80,000 range for top editors, plus stock options in CNET.

 When it was founded in 1992, CNET was bent on starting a twenty-four-hour cable TV network devoted to computers and technology, with a modest online component on the side. But things didn't turn out that way. Although CNET does produce three weekly shows for the Sci-Fi cable channel and one weekly syndicated program, the company is better known as a programmer of content for the Web, with cnet.com serving as the "front door" that leads users to news.com and nine other sites, including a game center and a site where users can download free software.

 The company went public in July 1996 with a share price of $16 and the stock joined the Internet valuation roller coaster, dipping to a low of $12 shortly after the company began trading to a high of $32.75 in January. Last December news.com got a big boost when The Wall Street Journal's widely read personal technology columnist, Walter Mossberg, called it "the jewel in CNET's crown." Traffic surged and CNET's share price jumped nearly 15 percent. As of early June, the stock hovered at $22.50.

 In 1995 CNET'S revenues -- nearly all from advertising on the Internet and on the television shows -- were $3.5 million, and increased to almost $15 million in 1996. But annual losses grew too, from $8.6 million to $16.9 million. Since the company's founding through the first quarter of this year, CNET has accumulated a deficit of $42 million. At news.com, at least, the key to reversing those losses is seen as quality reporting and analysis.

 Stories chosen at the news meeting in mid-May include coverage of the launch of ABC News's new website, ABCNews.com, an analysis of rates charged by Bell South for high-speed Internet access, an update on a widely anticipated software release from Netscape, and that feature on C++, which will turn out to be the lead item by 1 p.m.

Christopher Barr, forty-four and CNET's editor-in-chief, says the site's daily story budget was reduced -- from forty items to about twenty-five -- to allow editors and reporters more time for each piece. "We learned it wasn't about quantity," he says.

 The site is striving to build credibility. Singh says news. com will not run with a story unless it gets confirmation from three sources or a principal. But the site sometimes sidesteps its rule by running items with less-than-full confirmation in a column called "Rumor Mill."

News. com faces a special challenge in avoiding the appearance of a conflict of interest. Two major investors in CNET are the Intel Corp. and Paul Allen, co-founder of Microsoft -- all frequent subjects of news.com stories. Site policy is to reveal this whenever it is deemed relevant.

Singh and staff, meanwhile, are preparing a set of written rules of conduct. Some samples from a draft: accepting junkets from sources is Not O.K. (accepting small gifts is O.K., but probably with a $25 limit); and owning stock in technology companies is Not O.K., except through a mutual fund. "If there's even a hint of ethical compromise we don't have a business," Singh says. "We all bring our journalism heritage into this."

In print, he notes, "There's The New York Times and there's the National Enquirer. It's the same on the Net." He and his crew are counting on discerning readers to appreciate the difference.

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