Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, October 2, 1994 TAG: 9410220011
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: G7 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: JOSHUA QUITTNER NEWSDAY
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
A few other people standing around nod their heads. I don't know what she's talking about. I feel like Rip Van Winkle, out of it, disconnected. An unusual, sickening feeling overcomes me: For once in my life, I have ... nothing ... to say.
This was on Wednesday morning, four days after I gave up reading newspapers, news magazines. Ninety-six hours after I listened to my last television or radio news broadcast. (The last Big News I had heard was we were about to invade Haiti. Does Jimmy Carter have something to do with Haiti?)
I was part way through a self-imposed, weeklong mass-media news fast, an experiment to see whether I could satisfy my substantial news habit by gleaning information solely from the Internet.
I decided to eschew commercial online services, which, admittedly, have a huge amount of traditional news content, because I believe the Internet is where all the real action is. This experiment would gauge the quality and quantity of ``free'' news on the Net.
Living without mass-market news, I reasoned, was the best way to understand whether I could fill that void from the Internet. I was also doing it, though, in the spirit of someone who gets a medical checkup. Which is to say: I was looking for signs of my profession's mortality. The Death of Newspapers is a favorite topic among media critics, who look at declining circulation reports and see terminal illness.
Based on my experiment, newspapers and other mass-market media are still the easiest and cheapest way to get news. But, I found the seeds of New Media are germinating fast out on the Net.
In the end, I believe I got a glimpse of the newspaper of the future. Only it's not a newspaper at all, but a Web site. And it was put together, mostly, by software-based robots known as spiders. I am not making this up.
I spent the first few days of my News Exile driving through Usenet, a collection of more than 4,000, special-interest forums.
It's been said that one day, we'll be able to customize our daily news feeds. Most of the commercial online newspaper experiments are toying with the notion of a paper that you, the reader, create: You like local news more than world news? You configure your online service to put local news stories on the front page (or first screen, that is.) You want to read long, detailed accounts of certain events, and headline news of others? That's easy to do on a computer, too.
To a certain extent, I could already do that, in Usenet. I just read newsgroups that interest me. I found a group called alt.good.news, which I originally avoided since I thought it might be some kind of religious thing. It wasn't. Alt.good.news attempts to distribute, well, good news.
I wanted to find out what was going on in Haiti, so I checked out alt.current-events.haiti. All I found were people commenting on yesterday's news (or their understanding of yesterday's news). We should invade Haiti now. We shouldn't invade Haiti now. It was an interesting survey of opinions, but wholly unsatisfying from a hard-news perspective. What was happening right now in Haiti? This newsgroup gave no clue; it was like looking at the world off the platform of a speeding caboose.
Then, I found something called Clarinet, which is a real news service that resells Associated Press and Reuters wire stories to Internet providers. Many universities carry it.
Ahhhhhh. Here was real, diamond-hard news. Written by professionals, totally stripped of opinion. The only problem was, there was so much of it. I could choose from world news, national news, local news, features. Business news (world, national, regional and local), sports, weather, columnists (Mike Royko and Dave Barry).
I had no way of knowing what stories were hot: The news appeared in the format of Usenet newsgroups, which is to say, everything was printed in flat directories. A story about U.S. troops landing in Haiti appears, in Usenet format, in the same way as a recipe for corn bread. No headlines, no pictures, no fonts of different sizes. Pure, unfiltered news.
In other words, I still didn't know what Stephanie was talking about, because I couldn't find the Carter story (or stories) that provoked her comment. While I could lose myself in the thousands of micro-communities in Usenet (the woodworkers community, say, or the alt.good.news community) I no longer had common ground with the people who sat around me in the physical world.
So I started cruising around the Net using Mosaic, which is a powerful piece of software that makes it easier to transmit images and sounds and different styles of type. The problem with Mosaic is, you need a really fast connection to the Net to use it effectively; I'm using a black-and-white PowerBook (laptop computer) and a 14.4 modem.
Still, after much Net surfing (Mosaic lets you navigate by pointing at things and clicking on them with your mouse), I popped into a Web site called Yahoo, at Stanford University.
Here was all the information I could possibly ask for: More than a dozen newspapers, including The Detroit Free Press, The Virginian-Pilot, which has the same Internet connection as its sister paper, the Roanoke Times & World-News, the Knoxville News Sentinel, and The San Francisco Chronicle. USA Today, CNN Headline news. There were international papers, too, such as Gazeta Wyborcza, Poland's largest daily (which was only in Polish) and L'Unione Sarda, an Italian daily that was translated, but two days old.
To filter the overwhelming amount of data, Yahoo offers a kind of summary: You can click on a button to find things sorted by ``what's new,'' ``what's popular'' and ``what's cool.'' When you think about it, that's what a newspaper's layout does, too.
One day, Yahoo - or its successors - will be better than any one newspaper, simply because it will offer so much more information, information that I can filter any way I want. Even now, with only a little effort, I can check into the site, read a USA Today headline version of a Haiti story, then pop over to the White House for the full text of President Clinton's latest speech.
Of course, there will be one problem: Awash in all that data, Stephanie and I won't have anything to talk about.
by CNB