By Frank Houston
Frank Houston (frankhouston@hotmail. com), a former cjr assistant editor, is a free-lance writer in print and online, and continues to write an entertainment column for Fox News. He's still under thirty.

It is hard to believe, but in 1996 the Web was still relatively novel. That year a New Yorker cartoon lampooned the early hype with a sidewalk doomsayer holding a sign whose message, the end is near, is trailed by the requisite Web address, www.endnear.com. Soon The Simpsons took aim: Homer discovers the Internet, launches a new media company, Compuglobalhypermeganet, and, before he can figure out what he’s selling, is bought out by Bill Gates. New Yorker culture critic Kurt Andersen asked in early 1998 whether the Web was a mere "digital bubble," and the online magazine Salon took umbrage. "It’s no bubble," Salon said. "It’s a tide." Salon seems to be on the winning side, as Internet stock mania and online success stories fatten portfolios and validate the Web, at least for investors.

But what about journalists? What is news on the Web becoming?

Twenty-six months is a long time in new media, long enough to watch Web journalism transform itself and seek its place in the mediasphere. I was on hand when it was learning to crawl.

My online career began Sunday, October 6, 1996, the day Clinton and Dole met in Hartford for the first debate of the 1996 presidential race, the first election to receive extensive coverage on the Internet by most major news organizations, including mine – Fox News Online (www.foxnews.com). My career in new media ended – for now, at least – on Christmas Eve, 1998, just eight days after the year’s dominating news story, a runaway train of a scandal, entered its sobering denouement with Clinton’s impeachment. In the more than two years in between, as writer and editor at Fox News, I watched as several so-called Internet-defining news moments – notably mission to mars, death of a princess, and, of course, the starr report – came and went.

Housed in Manhattan’s Silicon Alley and ringed with suspended televisions, Fox News’s sleek newsroom suggests the bridge of the starship Enterprise. Little paper is put to use. Work flow is regulated by a piece of software ominously called the "integrator." E-mail is the dominant form of interoffice dialogue. Within days of starting my job as a feature writer, I realize that e-mail is also a venue for disjointed, almost subliminal communication. I am struck by the number of conversations I have via e-mail with people who might sit five or ten feet away, conversations that are never vocalized or, sometimes, even acknowledged.

As in most online news organizations, the vast majority of staff members are under thirty. The salaries of reporters, producers, and editors range from $30K to $60K, far exceeding what a newbie journalist might encounter at a small daily newspaper or on the lower rungs of some magazines.

I am hired by a twenty-six-year-old executive editor who reports to a twenty-eight-year-old executive producer. My job is to create feature stories that push the technological and interactive envelopes, working with a graphic designer, two producers, a photo editor, and, usually, a video producer. The goal is to see where the technology takes us, and to let a general "playground" atmosphere prevail.

When we sit down in a group to talk about the news and generate story ideas, I can’t resist the notion that we are kids, playing a game of "meeting." At one such "meeting," for example, story ideas are continually greeted with movie references: a story pitch about the business that undergirds the extreme sports trend calls forth memories of Rollerball. A discussion about cloning (and the speculation that humans might someday be cloned simply for organ transplanting) conjures up Michael Crichton's Coma.

In many meetings a protocol is observed in which a football is passed back and forth between designated speakers, much in the way power is conferred by the conch in Lord of the Flies. At one point, young managers promise "Friday movies" on the ring of TVs; at another, a newsroom pool table. Neither materializes.

There are advantages to our youthful outlook, as when Fox News Online produces its first feature, Tale of the Tape, measuring candidates Clinton and Dole like a pair of squared-off boxers. In addition to charting the two politicians’ positions on issues, the feature explores the generational differences between them. The category of Most Popular Television Show, Year of Birth, goes like this: "Clinton: Bonanza; Dole: Television not invented yet."

As the year goes on, Fox publishes several accessible and solid "explainers," including one on the federal deficit (remember that?), replete with a Debt Clock that continues ticking today (www.FoxNews.com/news/features/ budget/index.sml). We do another on the Dow, which is then bearing down on 7,000 (remember that?). We also produce a report on the fat federal subsidies received by Florida sugar barons. This includes a database of their Political Action Committee contributions to congressional campaigns, a video from the spring 1997 floor debate about their subsidies, and a state—by-state tally of every representative’s vote alongside the value of the sugar donation he or she received.

Following our technological mandate, we also make some creative innovations. Early in 1997, just after IBM’s Deep Blue computer defeats chess champ Garry Kasparov, we find an intriguing robotics experiment at the State University of New York, Buffalo, aimed at creating artificially intelligent robots that may someday service a space station. We create a feature about artificial intelligence around it, combining video and text in a new way (http://www.FoxNews.com/scitech/ features/intelligence/index.sml). The centerpiece is a standard, if lengthy, video package about the robot, named Cassie.

But we add another layer: at appropriate moments, links appear in a separate window that bring the visitor to different pieces of explanatory text. There is also a meticulously accurate graphical representation of Cassie’s thought process. This feature, which involves the full-time efforts of five staffers for several weeks, not to mention a free-lance video crew in Buffalo, is not only time-consuming to produce – it is also time-consuming for a site visitor to digest.

Whether we are ahead of the game or missing the point, these playground experiments suddenly began to look like time capsules. The Web, we soon find, is moving in a different direction. The features are too complicated and too deep for readers and for us. They often take three or more weeks to produce and contain too many pages.

The artificial intelligence piece, Inventing Intelligence, is one of the most popular features we ever produce. But that means it gets about 7,000 page views – the number of pages, and thus, advertising banners, served up to readers – for the week it is on the site. Top news stories routinely reach that many readers in a matter of hours. The features’ low page views do little to justify the considerable amount of effort and time it takes to publish them. Meanwhile, with audience measurements telling us that most people spend only a matter of seconds on a news Web page, whether on Foxnews.com or just about anywhere else, it becomes clear that our sprawling and eclectic stories are not to be the site’s bread and butter.

The Web is so new to us. We assume that it will create fascinating new ways to tell stories, that we "content providers" will determine what the content is to be. But the Internet is a fathomless ocean and technology is like an ever-moving shark. We are too enthralled, too busy, and too slow to see that we are powerless to guide it. We swim along like pilot fish near the maw of the great digital beast.

Technology’s thrust, it turns out, is to satisfy the need for speed. The emphasis shifts to shorter, more frequent stories and breaking news. Around the same time, in the summer of 1997, I shift too: after being a writer for nine months, I become deputy editor, overseeing the site’s staff of ten reporters and copy editors, and its "original content." Managing breaking news in a medium that is making the notion of a news "cycle" obsolete is 180 degrees from the long-term, in-depth feature work. Over time I find that news elsewhere on the Web is moving rapidly in the same direction.

A Jupiter Communications survey would soon reveal what I was seeing as an editor: "Online users are gravitating to the Web . . . to collect top headlines and breaking news." This is as true for Fox as it is for our competitors, CNN, MSNBC, and ABCNews.com. Features come fewer and farther between, and we are faced with a greater challenge: how to provide "top headlines and breaking news" that are somehow different from those of the wire services, to which Fox, like just about every news Web site, subscribes.

Jupiter would also touch on this problem: "Newswires, predominantly a service developed for news providers, are gaining more acceptance in the public eye. Since search engines pull stories straight from the wires, news services such as The Associated Press, Bloomberg, and Reuters are becoming more familiar to consumers."

In truth, the wires dominate much of the Web’s news – a consequence of the mad dash for headlines. Broadcasters and newspapers, the parents of most online news sites, arrive at this need for wire content from different directions. Both result from tight budgets in a medium where most players, waiting for advertising revenues to really take off, are still asking, like Homer on that Simpsons episode, "Can I have some money now?" The broadcasters (Fox, CNN, ABC, MSNBC) have their editorial resources in video and little experience in – or money for – the reporting/writing staffs that could compete with the wire services. They can’t beat them, so they pay for and publish them instead.

Newspapers, on the other hand, aren’t accustomed to publishing on the wire’s schedule – a continual stream of rewrites, adds, and new leads. Consequently, the news content of their sites is often either the repurposed morning paper, or – you guessed it – hot off the wires. When an Amtrak train crashes outside Chicago in March, for example, The New York Times and other newspaper sites go with wire copy on their home pages. In the next morning’s paper edition, of course, the story has staff bylines. In that interim period after news occurs, how does a news site distinguish itself from a wire service?

The question takes me from puzzlement to disenchantment, particularly when, five months into my job as deputy editor, all news becomes a static-filled backdrop to the one true Big Story.

In the early days, the Dickensian name of Matt Drudge seems as obscure as that of any one of a thousand college students who might set up vanity Web pages, and, while I occasionally visit www.thedrudgereport.com, I pay the Winchell of the Web little heed. When I receive a Drudge e-mail bulletin in late January that outlines Newsweek’s decision to hold Michael Isikoff’s story about Linda Tripp’s tapes, the idea of a presidential affair strikes me as overly familiar. Without devoting much thought to it, I hit "delete." Who knew?

As The Story gains momentum, its sheer power and velocity determine the way news plays on the Internet. It is fast and nearly cycle-less, very competitive and, at the same time, repetitive – a lot, in short, like cable television news.

The Story plays itself out over the rest of my time at Fox. Each new development – Monica’s immunity deal with Ken Starr, the DNA test, and so on – corresponds to a boost, or "spike," in traffic. The definition of a big day for a major news story at Fox, in terms of page views, moves from 20,000 to 30,000, even 40,000 to 600,00 for the release of the Starr report on the Internet on September 11. While the numbers usually dip again, they almost always level off higher than they’d been the day before the peak.

On and on it goes, until page views on the Fox site as a whole roughly doubled from late ’97 to late ’98 – from 600,000 to 1.2 million. They hit an all-time high of 2.2 million on the afternoon of December 16, that unsettling moment when Henry Hyde’s impeachment hearings share the screen with green-hued images of anti-aircraft gunfire over Baghdad. People from throughout the company – Rupert Murdoch’s News America Digital Publishing – gather in small groups in front of the overhead televisions that encircle the newsroom.

The reporters who will cobble together copy to post on our site are getting their information from television. And the Web is at that moment recycling it to millions of news surfers, most of them probably turning to the Web at work because there are no televisions on their desks. For all its technological dazzlement, the Internet can’t yet improve on the captivating grip of the moving image.

But the Web can co-opt it, and many broadcast sites, like Fox, do just that with an extensive use of video from their parent corporations. "Broadcast" initiatives are also under way that will offer more video content to surfers with high-capacity cable modems.

As I watch everyone around me riveted to televisions, including headline writers and reporters, I am seeing Web journalism for what it is becoming: a machine moving at the speed of the wires, in terms of content, and in the direction of television, in terms of form. Experiments in storytelling are on an indefinite hiatus. It will only a matter of days before I leave the job

Journalism on the Internet may be destined to become souped-up television news, but souped-up is the operative phrase. If you came to the Web for news on a wide variety of important stories – the bombing in Kosovo, say, or the war of nerves with Iraq – chances are you could have found more than enough background, in the form of historical timelines, summaries, interactive maps, interviews, and explanatory graphics, to educate yourself.

Newspapers can be good at this depth and context thing, but you won’t see them publishing so much on a daily basis, unless newsprint is to be suddenly given away free. And television news just doesn’t have the time to spare. Even investigating clinton – the news package we create for the tangled tale leading from Whitewater to Monica via Paula – features lots of video, source material, timelines, and historical context. I came to really see what others have preached – that one value of Web journalism is context and depth, accessible any time, any day.

Do readers really want that? They haven’t demonstrated the same appetite for it that they do for top stories. But at least the stuff is there, and I think news organizations like Fox know such depth may be the only way to distinguish themselves from a wire service.

So why did I jump ship? Much as I can see the potential value in Web journalism’s bottomless newshole, my initial attraction to the medium had more to do with the idea of making innovating news, not just appending a library to it. Then there was the pace. Too often, the Internet struck me as no more than another product of the age’s insatiable appetite for speed, and I’ve never been one to hang on every new breaking headline – especially when the headlines come five minutes apart, as was sometimes the case. In the end, I was Drudged out.

I guess I’m not the only one who’s worried about the real place of journalists on the Web. In one of my last few weeks at Fox, I read about Jupiter’s Digital News Forum at the CNN Center last December in Atlanta. The two-day forum was convened to discuss how the Web "affects the news cycle of conventional media outlets, and poses the question of whether or not the giants of traditional news delivery can survive in such a fast-paced environment," in the words of Jupiter’s press release.

I noticed some of the questions that were to be addressed in the form of panel topics, including an "executive roundtable" titled "The End Of Journalism?" as well as "Reinventing The News Cycle" and one about how to deal with the challenge of being dominated by the likes of the AP – "Competing Against Convenience: Attempting To Maneuver Past The Wire." Maybe the conversation that had seemed beside the point in the Web’s earliest days – the one we’d been too busy to have before about the ultimate shape of journalism online – was beginning to take place in a serious way. It’s time.

In the early days in our little feature shop at Fox, we were too young even to realize that such basic questions had to be answered before experiments like ours could be worthwhile – if they ever will be. I, for one, am still betting on innovation. But a new form of storytelling, something original and unique to online journalism, is the kind of breakthrough that can come only when a medium feels comfortable in its own skin.

Journalism has always gone where technology has led, whether it was into the radio or onto the tube. So it seems that, as the Internet goes, so goes journalism. But beyond headline news and television-plus, where it’s leading now is difficult to see. We swim along in front of the shark, in front of technology's great open maw, as if we were leading. But we’re not.

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