by James Ledbetter
With this issue, James Ledbetter begins a regular column in CJR about the Internet and other new media, and their growing impact on journalism. Ledbetter has a unique vantage point as New York bureau chief of The Industry Standard (jim@thestandard.com), a magazine that covers the Internet industry. He formerly was media critic for The Village Voice and is the author of Made Possible By - The Death of Public Broadcasting in the United States.

Like just about everybody else in the media business, newspapers around America have over the past year embraced the idea of the portal. In mid-July, The Washington Post announced that it was partnering with the Palo Alto-based Internet firm Alta Vista to produce a portal site this fall that will function in part as a guide to the Washington area. AltaVista already operates similar sites in conjunction with The New York Times and Houston Chronicle. Both the Tribune and Knight Ridder chains have developed sites at certain newspapers into vast collections of more community information than any reader could absorb at a single sitting. The Charlotte Observer has even developed a Web site (www.thatsracin.com) that considers itself a NASCAR portal.

What exactly does it mean for a newspaper - or anyone else - to become a "portal"? When the term "Internet portal" first began to be widely used in 1997, it meant just what it sounds like: an entryway, the first page encountered before the user sailed into the Web sea. Around the same time, sites like Yahoo! and Excite - known primarily for their ability to search the Web - began adding other features designed to keep users in their Web site rather than point them outward. Those dressed-up search engines are what are now commonly referred to as portals.

The portal strategy has two aims: first, accumulate as many visitors as possible. A good example of this strategy is Massachusetts-based Lycos, which over the last few years has snapped up a number of small but very popular Internet sites - like the personal Web page builder Tripod and the search engine HotBot - and successfully converted their audiences into a Lycos audience.

A second goal is to keep visitors on a site for as long as possible. Many media companies, old and new, find it difficult to keep readers for more than a few minutes at a time - an obvious drawback for advertisers. So, theoretically, a portal offers everything that the Web reader might crave - from instant stock quotes to interactive maps, from breaking news stories to buying and selling opportunities to free e-mail — all to keep the visitor around long enough to notice the ads.

On the Internet, old media outfits are just as tempted by these strategies as anyone else. In 1998, both ABC and NBC made major investments in Internet companies, and began to blend their own offerings into, respectively, the go.com and snap.com portals. The next logical step - Stage Two - is to spin off the company's Internet/portal offerings into a separate company with its own potentially lucrative stock (as both those networks plan to do before year's end). The object, of course, is to attract Wall Street and individual investors.

Newspapers have moved in the same direction, larding on Internet features and drawing up plans for separate Internet companies. The Boston Globe has already plunged into the world of e-commerce. The paper's site (www.boston.com) offers Wedding411, a service that, among other things, allows engaged couples to register with local stores' online guest-management services. Following the formidable success of eBay, boston.com recently added auctions to its Internet menu.

And financially, the Globe's owner - The New York Times Company - is considering a spinoff play: moving off all of its Internet holdings into a separate company with a separate stock. No less an Internet enthusiast than Times chairman Arthur O. Sulzberger Jr. recently told his staff in a memo that "It's important that everyone through the Times Co. feels personally involved in the success of our newest line of business." (Translation: don't worry, you'll get yours.)

The Washington Post's plans are ambitious: an overhaul of its already successful site, www.washingtonpost.com, to offer local shopping guides, personal finance tools, free e-mail, personalized calendar services, and more. Like The Washington Post itself, the Web site currently makes most of its revenues from advertising, but it will now more aggressively pursue e-commerce, according to Greg Eckstrom, the site's vice-president of marketing. Inevitably, Eck strom acknowledges, these efforts mean that the Post's current news offerings "will be giving up some real estate" on the Post's Web home page. Having conducted a series of focus groups, Eckstrom says the Post is seeking a way "to better answer and fulfill consumers' needs."

You don't have to poke around at the newspaper portal theory for too long before some problems emerge. First of all, even companies that don't have journalism as their main business are reevaluating the wisdom of portals. After nearly a year of combining the Infoseek search engine with the ABC Network, ESPN's various sites, and the Disney Online offerings, Disney's go.com has not seen any significant growth in its audience. One former Disney executive attributes this to the fact that the various sites appeal to widely diverging demographic groups.

Second, consider the two most successful newspaper Web sites to date. USA Today's site (www.usatoday.com) gets higher traffic than any other daily paper's site, and The Wall Street Journal's site has miraculously managed to convince more than 300,000 Internet users that it's worth $59 a year ($29 for paper Journal or Barron's subscribers). It doesn't hurt that those papers' print products are also the highest circulating papers in the country, so they start at an advantage. But significantly, neither of them has ever tried to be a portal.

Each features some handy Net functions like searchable archives and the Journal's "briefing books" on public companies, and they update the news several times a day. The fundamental approach of both sites, however, is to reproduce faithfully what appears in their print editions. (The Journal is expanding its online offerings into the areas of travel, real estate, and career help, but for now those sites are kept fairly separate from the news pages of wsj.com.)

Even on its own terms, the newspaper portal strategy appears risky. After all, it's hard enough for the companies that specialize in selling goods and services online to make a profit; it's far from clear that newspaper publishers can make money selling stuff online when Amazon.com, CDNow, and almost all other "e-tailers" have yet to do so.

And finally, it's troubling that none of the newspaper portals feels that quality journalism is at the center of its strategy - not because they don't believe in it, but because journalism doesn't really help you sell things. That's a source of worry and friction within the papers themselves. In a New York Times Magazine column this summer, veteran editor (and now columnist) Max Frankel said that the more that newspapers pursue wide Web audiences, "the more will sex, sports, violence, and comedy appear on their menus, slighting, if not altogether ignoring, the news of foreign wars or welfare reform."

Perhaps unintentionally underlining Frankel's point, The Washington Post's Eckstrom, while singing the praises of his paper's upcoming portal makeover, complained of currently having to "slog through East Timor to get to the restaurant information." The people pushing the portal strategies at newspapers insist that this is merely a question of design, that all the journalism produced by a newspaper and more will remain available on their sites. But it's not hard to foresee a future in which newspaper companies, having become "Internet content" companies, say to themselves: "We've got all these people coming to our Web site to buy things directly from our advertisers, book tickets, and make their wedding plans. Why are we paying so many reporters to write stories that those customers aren't interested in?

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