ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Tuesday, November 12, 1996 TAG: 9611120050
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C-5 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: SPOTSYLVANIA (AP)
SOURCE: TED BYRD\The Free Lance-Star
ALTERNATIVE JOURNALISM finds a home in cyberspace and employment for ex-newsman.
Brock Meeks wants to be the Coca-Cola of cyberspace, the Big Mac of the computer world. He wants to be the icon of journalism on the Internet, a one-person news service in this emerging electronic age.
Meeks lives in Spotsylvania County's Chancellor Hills subdivision; but for years, he has been a fixture in the virtual world of the Internet. He attracted international attention in 1992 with his CyberWire Dispatch column.
Now he's doing stories and a political column for the Internet version of Wired, a trendy and popular computer magazine.
Meeks weighs in on privacy, legal and personal issues on the World Wide Web, all in a blistering, dramatic style that mixes reporting and opinion-writing. But as Meeks points out, there isn't much that's subtle about the Internet.
``You have to do something to stand out. You have to create a voice, you have to create a brand name,'' Meeks, 40, said during a recent interview in his Washington office. ``I'm opinionated and at times often strident. But that comes from the nature of the Web.''
Meeks' office is typical computer-land sparse. The desk is a door set on cinder blocks. There's a photograph of Meeks' wife on the wall, a tangle of computer cables on the floor.
His writing style has been called ``Way New Journalism.'' It's a variation on the New Journalism of the 1960s - Tom Wolfe's style of reporting groundbreaking social changes by putting himself in the middle of the action. For added irreverence, Meeks tosses in a little of the drug-taking, authority-hating of Hunter Thompson's Gonzo Journalism.
Partakers of his column ``appreciate that my opinions are right up-front,'' he said. ``People don't like ambiguity on the Net. And you can argue they don't like it in mainstream journalism.''
Writing about opposition to the Communications Decency Act, the federal bill to regulate computer pornography, Meeks wanted to make the point that decency is hard to define and even harder to control. He wrote about smutty pictures on a bathroom wall in the Russell Senate Building on Capitol Hill.
``The fact that smutty pictures are plastered to the bathroom walls of the Senate is only mildly amusing; the real irony is that I first discovered them on the day that Sen. James Exon, D-Neb., successfully added his Communications Decency Act to the telecommunications reform bill as an amendment, in the Commerce Committee hearing room of the same building,'' Meeks wrote.
When he's not working for Wired, he's doing his CyberWire column on the side. He sends it out via an e-mail subscription list.
``Overall, what I try to do is take traditional-style journalism and meld that with a commentary style that's unique to the Web,'' he said.
He places most importance, however, on being accurate. That's why he started in the first place.
The bonus for Meeks is that he has a lot of fun.
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