Wire(d) Stories

__"What I Saw in the Digital Sea" by Frank Houston, in Columbia Journalism Review (July–Aug. 1999), Journalism Bldg., 2950 Broadway, Columbia Univ., New York, N.Y. 10027.__

Web journalism is fast evolving—but, nalist went to work for Fox News Online in unfortunately, some of its best potential is New York in October 1996, hoping to conbeing left behind, according to Houston, a tribute fresh news feature stories. He quit in freelance writer. The twenty-something jour-disillusion a little more than two years later, he writes, having come to see "Web journalism for what it is becoming: a machine moving at the speed of the [news] wires, in terms of content, and in the direction of television, in terms of form. Experiments in storytelling are on an indefinite hiatus."

Houston’s job originally was "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." Early in 1997, for example, after IBM’s Deep Blue computer bested chess champ Garry Kasparov, Houston and his colleagues prepared a feature about Cassie, an experimental robot equipped with artificial intelligence that was assembled at the State University of New York at Buffalo. Combining video and text "in a new way," he says, the feature—complete with links to various explanatory sidebars and "a meticulously accurate graphical representation of [the robot’s] thought processes"—proved one of their most popular feature stories, getting some 7,000 "page views" during the week it was on the site.

But top online news stories get that many page views in mere hours, Houston notes, and most people, research has found, spend only seconds visiting a news Web page. Not surprisingly, he and his colleagues soon found the Web moving away from costly and complicated features. "Technology’s thrust, it turns out, is to satisfy the need for speed. The emphasis shifts to shorter, more frequent stories and breaking news"—a trend evident not only at Fox but at its .com competitors, CNN, MSNBC, and ABCNews. The result: between late 1997 and late ’98, daily page views on the Fox site as a whole roughly doubled—from 600,000 to 1.2 million (and reached 2.2 million on one particularly hot news day).

In their unquenchable thirst for breaking news, ironically, the Web sites have turned to the established wire services, such as the Associated Press and Reuters. The broadcast owners of online news sites lack the staff to compete with the wire services—and, in the absence of substantial Web ad revenues, the willingness to spend money to develop one. Newspaper owners of Web sites give priority to their newspapers and aren’t accustomed to publishing on the frenetic schedule of the wire services, with their continual stream of updates, adds, and new leads. "When an Amtrak train crashes... the New York Times and other newspaper sites go with wire copy on their home pages," Houston notes. Only after the newspaper’s reporters have written their stories for the paper’s next edition are the wire stories on the home page replaced with the "homegrown" ones.

One way that Fox and other news organizations have tried to distinguish themselves from the wire services, Houston observes, is by providing, on big stories, a wealth of background material, from interviews to interactive maps. But "appending a library" to breaking wire stories, Houston says, is hardly the same as innovative journalism, with fresh insight and compelling stories. For now at least, he sadly concludes, Web technology’s own imperatives seem to be driving out that kind of journalism.