Why Web Warriors Might Worry

Part of the pleasure and excitement of online journalism is smashing antique rules, overturning taboos, and rethinking the very idea of news. Part of the danger is that some of those antique rules still make sense and some of th ose taboos can still keep us from eating our mothers -- or our standards. In the brave but chaotic new world of online journalism, rethinking the news doesn't always mean improving it. Even some optimistic observers have several areas of concern:

INTERACTIVITY. This is supposed to be the most distinctive contribution of online journalism. Webheads see interactivity as a way to draw millions of mouse potatoes together in a virtual community, to engage and involve them in the news, and to sti mulate public debate. Well, sometimes.

 Take, for example, the CNN-Time website AllPolitics, which runs the gamut of interactive devices and gimmicks: free-form bulletin boards, instant "Take a Stand" polls ("Is FDR the greatest president of the 20th century?"), an e-mail forum called "Voter's Voice" on the issue of the day (late-term abortion, the budget), and a daily trivia quiz that can earn you a totebag and your name in lights, or at least in html. Throughout 1996 the site offered a riot of campaign-theme games, including a post-election s ingle-elimination tournament called "Pitfalls" designed to predict Bill Clinton's biggest second-term problem. (Campaign fund-raising beat out Hillary and Bosnia, among others.)

 Bulletin boards and e-mail may make for discussions as feisty as anything that iconic old town square ever saw -- but much of this famous "interactivity" is closer in spirit to Jeopardy than to a C-SPAN call-in. Why should a website's instant poll on FDR' s status be hailed as constructive engagement when the networks' overnight tracking polls on Bob Dole's status were routinely denounced as shallow or undemocratic? Why is sitting alone pondering a trivia question about Millie, the former First Dog, more c ommunitarian than sitting alone heaving your shoe at the television set?

 Some new-media mavens also boast how much more accessible -- and thus accountable -- online journalists are than traditional newspeople. But while reader feedback can help keep reporters honest, some new-media journalists are toying with another use of re ader opinion that skates close to an abdication of their editorial judgment. MSNBC, for instance, invites you to rate the stories you read on a scale of one to seven according to how highly you would recommend each one to other "viewers," as MSNBC calls t hem. After you submit your rating, you're whisked to a page that lists the Top Ten stories of the minute with their scores.

 According to Merrill Brown, editor-in-chief of MSNBC Interactive, the goal of the ranking is "principally and almost solely" to help people "share good ideas about interesting stuff they found in a deep, rich news environment that can be difficult to navi gate, and also to give us some clues about what people are interested in." He insists that the rankings play no role in editorial decisionmaking. "In the hands of Rupert Murdoch it would turn out that way," he says, "but we're pretty serious about this en terprise." Serious or not, it's hard not to notice how many health stories land in the Top Ten--and how many new health stories crowd the MSNBC site every day.

CREDIBILITY AND AUTHORITY. On the Web, journalism, parajournalism, and pseudojournalism don't just coexist; they invade each other, through the handy online device of the hypertext link. While a newspaper editor can -- theoretically, anyway -- main tain iron control over the content of her four sections' worth of newsprint, no online journalist, no matter how scrupulous his own standards, can predict where his readers might daisy-chain their way. Even the most respectable news site has the potentia l to launch the unwary surfer straight through the looking glass.

 The Web browser interested in the JonBenet Ramsey case, for instance -- the Christmas-night murder of the children's-beauty-pageant queen in Colorado -- might logically choose to start with the perfectly credible Denver Post, a local paper that has devote d extensive coverage to the crime. But the Post website includes a link to the home page of the Boulder sheriff's office. The sheriff's page links to a resource called "Law Enforcement Sites." And that site can take you to something blandly entitled "JonB enet Ramsey Homicide Web Sites," a page, maintained by one Ken Polzin, Jr., of links to some four dozen other websites pertaining to the case.

 Polzin's standard for inclusion is clearly "relevance," not accuracy or even sanity. His page can take you to MSNBC's search engine, transcripts of press conferences, or a redacted version of the official autopsy report. Or you can just as easily surf rig ht into the "Reverse Speech" site and listen for yourself to the "smoking gun" in the case: snippets from the audiotape of the Ramsey parents' CNN interview played backwards, supplemented with helpful transcripts in case you can't quite make out on your o wn that John Ramsey's tergiversated voice is in fact saying "I done it. It's a show you're running."

 You can almost make a Six-Degrees-of-Kevin-Bacon game of it: how many links does it take to get from the home page of The New York Times to, say, a news release announcing authoritatively that "Pressure is growing on Capitol Hill for immediate impeachment hearings on President Clinton and Vice President Gore"? (Or so says the Committee to Impeach the President, which has just doubled its roster of supporters in Congress -- to two.) How about a guide to the "hanky code" used by gay men to signal their pref erences? (I made each connection in eight links.) But the question remains: how many rushed or inattentive surfers will end up wondering whether The Denver Post also has new evidence that Paul McCartney is dead?

CHURCH AND STATE. The rules seem to be different for online advertising, too. A survey by the Newspaper Association of America points to a disturbing trend: while no decent newspaper would dream of assigning its metro reporter to write headlines fo r its advertisers, most of the newspapers with separate new-media staffs routinely ask editorial employees to design or produce banner ads for their websites.

 Chris McKenna, a producer for Time Online, says that while her own organization has never asked her to do any business-side work, there does seem to be a sense among many news organizations that all standards are a bit looser online. "Some print media don 't seem to take their online sites quite as seriously," she says. "They don't give them enough resources; they might expect a producer, say, to be a researcher and fact-checker and editor, too. It's as if they're saying 'Hey, we can compromise a bit, it's not our flagship product.'"

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