By Nicholas Stein
Stein is CJR’s assistant editor.

In Turn of the Century, Kurt Andersen’s expansive new novel for the Internet Age, hackers break into the Reuters database and file a fictitious account of Bill Gates’s disappearance while scuba diving. Within seconds, Internet stock trades flood the market and Microsoft shares plummet, forcing the NASDAQ to halt trading. The humor of this scenario lies in its inherent plausibility. At a time when Matt Drudge influences tomorrow’s headlines, when MSNBC.com asks visitors to rate its news stories, and when red-ink-stained Internet companies carry market valuations north of General Electric, anything seems possible.

"Online journalism is still the wild, wild West," says Rich Jaroslovsky, managing editor of The Wall Street Journal Interactive Edition. "The concern is that this ‘anything goes’ mentality doesn’t spill into the news coverage." To allay such fears, Jaroslovsky and other prominent Web-based journalists have launched the Online News Association (ONA), a professional organization styled after the American Society of Newspaper Editors (ASNE) and the Radio-Television News Directors Association (RTNDA). Its mission: to encourage "the highest possible standards in this new medium."

On a muggy evening in May, in a casual Indian restaurant in Manhattan, the ONA held its first official function. Nearly 100 attendees, most of them well under forty, gathered for a panel discussion titled "Online News! What is it Good For?" The audience listened as Jaroslovsky, ONA’s president; Jamie Heller, the executive editor of TheStreet.com and ONA’s treasurer; and Janice Castro, editor of TIME.com and ONA’s secretary, outlined the challenges facing online journalism today, and the role the new organization hopes to play in the medium’s evolution.

Over the course of the evening and in subsequent interviews, the panelists tried to address some of these concerns:

Who Is An Online Journalist?
The Internet has enabled individuals with little or no journalistic training or experience to transmit their findings, spurious or otherwise, to millions. Non-journalistic Web sites like Yahoo!, America Online, and bn.com, the Barnes & Noble site, have people doing work that is essentially journalistic in nature, from writing stories to choosing relevant links. So who has the right to call himself an online journalist? The ONA has opted for an expansive definition, at least in terms of who can join the organization: "It is the job, and not the environment, that defines who is eligible," says Jaroslovsky. "You can’t go by the site, or by our own opinion of the quality of the work."

Gaps in the Chinese Wall
In many online operations, both journalists and their supervisors are young and have never been immersed in the traditional news culture that keeps ad and editorial functions a respectable distance apart. And since many online operations are small, the two sides often share the same cramped space. As such, the opportunity for blurring the invisible line between them is greater. In addition, the design of the medium sometimes makes ads and editorial indistinguishable. "Readers are more accustomed to knowing what an ad looks like in newspaper and magazines," Heller says. The ONA is working on the creation of online advertising guidelines. Had such guidelines been in place, Castro muses, the ubiquitous practice of spreading banner ads across the home pages of most sites might have been discouraged.

The Digital Focus Group
For years, editors have used focus groups to discern the wishes of readers. But the technology of online journalism makes it dramatically easier to do so, increasing the temptation to pander to readers’ tastes. Online editors now have the ability to calculate, almost instantaneously, exactly how many readers look at each article on their site and how long they spend there. James Poniewozik, media columnist for Salon, wondered in a recent column whether, "as we get better and better at giving readers exactly what they want, what will be the percentage in trying to give readers what we think they need?"

The ONA hopes to start an industry-wide conversation on this subject. At the Journal, Jaroslovsky says, reader measurements often have expanded rather than narrowed the range of content. In one case, he added Kuala Lumpur to his site’s list of top stock markets after several requests from subscribers. "I began to realize that though the numbers of people who were interested were small, the intensity of their interest was enormous."

The ONA also plans to create prizes for quality online journalism.

While groups like the Internet Content Coalition and the News Rating Council have addressed Internet issues before, the ONA is the first explicitly journalistic organization to do so, says Sreenath Sreenivasan, who teaches new media at Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism. Jaroslovsky feels that the print backgrounds of ONA’s founders have schooled them in the core "values" of traditional journalism, which they hope to impart to their new medium.

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