A Reporter Lost in Cyberspace

By DAVID SHAW

June 15, 1997 12 AM PT

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TIMES STAFF WRITER

Virtually everyone I knew was touting the utilitarian virtues--and the unprecedented potential--of the Internet.

As a journalist--and especially as a journalist who writes about the media--I would be doing myself (and my readers) an injustice, they said, if I continued to ignore a rapidly developing technology that was destined to revolutionize both my job and our world.

But I was (a) busy and (b) terrified.

I am a technological idiot. I can’t do any home repairs more complicated than changing a lightbulb. If I dare try, our 7-year-old son, Lucas, immediately suggests that I should “call Michael Collins,” a contractor friend of ours.

I am even more helpless when it comes to a car, and as for computers--well, inserting a floppy disk in the A drive (or is it the B drive?) is about as sophisticated as I get. I bought Lucas a computer for Christmas, then couldn’t get him connected to any online service. When someone finally got it connected, I couldn’t get the e-mail function to work. With my own computers--desktop and laptop alike--I had to call The Times computer gurus for assistance so often that I felt guilty and paid them out of my own pocket.

But I decided my friends were right; I should learn about the Internet. Before it was too late. After all, it was already “the most powerful publishing system in the world,” a medium that had “profoundly changed how both news and rumor is spread in society,” according to John Markoff of the New York Times, one of the first mainstream journalists to cover cyberspace.

Before I had my first experience on the Internet--which requires only a computer, a modem and an Internet service provider--millions of Americans had regularly gone online to get instant updates on news, sports, weather and the stock market. They had also gone online to bank, read magazines, play games, trade securities, file their income taxes, go to traffic school, look at pornography, apply to college, look for a job, track a FedEx package, attend “virtual” meetings and conferences, make free international phone calls, send birth announcements, make airplane and hotel reservations, communicate by e-mail and in online “chat rooms” with friends, colleagues, soul mates and strangers, listen to live sports events in distant cities and buy everything from a book, a baseball bat or a bottle of wine to a new car and a new home.

Buckingham Palace and Saddam Hussein have their own home pages on the World Wide Web, the primary component and transportation system of the Internet. So does the Kent School District in Washington, which uses the Internet to post students’ work--including artwork--for their family and friends to see. Comedian Billy Crystal even used the Internet to solicit jokes for the Academy Awards telecast; he received more than 35,000 of them.

Even though the Internet is still a primitive culture in its “prehistoric phase,” as Martin Nisenholtz, president of the New York Times Electronic Media Co., puts it, there are an estimated 50 million to 60 million Internet users worldwide. More than 75% of them are in the United States and Canada. That number has doubled in the last year, and the amount of time the average user spends online has increased about 50% in the same period. Last year, for the first time ever, more computers than television sets were sold in the United States.

Clearly, something big was happening, and if I didn’t want to wind up feeling like a blacksmith at a Boeing factory, I knew I’d better get with it.

I’ve often told friends that one of the great joys of journalism is that it provides the best opportunity imaginable for postgraduate education: You get to pick your subjects, your teachers and your textbooks, and instead of paying tuition, you get paid a salary. So I decided to take a postgraduate course in the Internet--and to examine what everyone said would be its transforming effect on journalism and our entire culture.

A Library With No Catalog

A few weeks into my research, a friend called to tell me he had lung cancer.

“It’s a small tumor,” he said. “The doctor thinks we caught it early. Shouldn’t be a big deal.”

I knew that he was trying to reassure himself as much as me, and I wanted to help if I could.

“Let me check out the Internet,” I said. “People have been telling me that you can find all kinds of good stuff there on any medical condition. Maybe there’s some new treatment or some information on prognosis that you could ask your doctor about.”

Feeling like a cross between Bill Gates and Madame Curie, I bounded upstairs to my computer, signed on to the Internet and typed in “Lung AND cancer AND smoking AND treatment” on one of the search engines that are supposed to help you find anything you want (sort of like a Thomas Bros. map for the Internet).

I got 98,456 “hits”--almost 100,000 separate stories. After looking at the first dozen or so--none of which proved even remotely useful--I gave up.

I had already heard and read a great deal about similar adventures in cyberspace. Looking online for something specific is only slightly less daunting than walking into the world’s largest library and finding that not only is there no Dewey decimal system but that all the books have been thrown on the floor by an angry and hyperkinetic 3-year-old.

The major search engines--Yahoo!, Excite, Lycos and Alta Vista--are being improved all the time. But they still spew out tens of thousands of useless replies to many requests, leaving the user inundated with more information than he can possibly sort through. Often the stories have no bearing on what you’re looking for, and it’s impossible to figure out what bizarre logic produced them in the first place.

Not long after my online cancer quest, I was in Northern California, interviewing Mark Pincus, chief executive officer of Freeloader, an Internet delivery system that provides customized news. In the course of asking about search engines, I told him of my experience.

Pincus gently reminded me of the value of common sense, online as elsewhere: “In searching, you’ll learn in time that certain trusted intermediary sources have the best information.” The Mayo Clinic, he said, would have been a “trusted intermediary” in my cancer search.

Then he turned to his own computer and typed in “mayo.com.”

Within nanoseconds, his screen was filled by . . . the Web site for mayonnaise.

Suddenly, I didn’t feel so stupid.

Pincus was undaunted. He typed in “mayoclinic.com”--and got a mere 10,600 hits, most of which looked as useless as my 98,456. Then he refined his search still further, to the Mayo Clinic’s family health page. He wound up on a site that told him how to order a book that had nothing to do with cancer of any type.

My experience--and Pincus’--is not uncommon in the Brave New World of the World Wide Web as I found out repeatedly during my research. Given my own ignorance in matters mechanical and electrical, I was prepared to have a high tolerance for misadventure. I wasn’t surprised that at one point, my office computer somehow ate all my notes. Or that my laptop suddenly froze late one night, turned itself off and wouldn’t turn back on. Or that many online programs I downloaded either paralyzed my computer or thoroughly baffled me.

Still, I’ve finally learned to at least stumble my way around the Internet, and I now routinely sign on for e-mail, weather, sports scores, news headlines and various other services. I’ve even downloaded a few programs--and run them--successfully. I’ve gradually come to appreciate the appeal and value of the Net and to share the view of many friends and colleagues that, in the next millennium, it could radically transform almost everything we do--albeit not, I think, as quickly as its most passionate advocates predict. After all, a recent study by FIND/SVP found that while 20 million Americans now view the Internet as “indispensable,” a whopping 9.3 million have tried the Net and abandoned it.

For the moment, computers are big, expensive and complicated, and access to the Internet is neither free (usually about $20 a month) nor completely dependable (online delays are so common that the World Wide Web is often called the World Wide Wait).

All this will change in time, but for now I know that I have a great deal of grumpy company in my futile, frustrating attempts to get through to America Online and my e-mail connection and my high-speed Internet service provider.

I am also certain that I have not been alone in the receipt of messages warning me that one computer program or another had “performed an illegal operation” and would be “shut down.” Nor do I think it was my fault every time some Internet operation responded to one of my clicks with the message, “Fatal error--Unable to continue.”

Similarly, I can’t believe it was my fault that I couldn’t find a 6-month-old New York Times restaurant review on America Online (which is the only place you can read them, because the New York Times’ own Web site doesn’t make them available). The name of the Italian restaurant I wanted to read about starts with an “I,” and for some bizarre reason as near as I could tell, AOL only included New York Times reviews of Italian restaurants whose names began with “A” through “F.”

I know for a fact that I wasn’t the only baseball fan who couldn’t access the Instant Ballpark feature of the Web site instantsports.com earlier this season because David Barstow, the chairman and chief executive officer of the company, told me so when I interviewed him. He said the problem involved something to do with Java applets--which I assumed were small apple tarts that one drank with coffee until a friend explained that they involved a special programming language. I asked what I could do about these disobedient applets.

“Pray that we come up with a solution,” Barstow said.

I found that reply--and the equally candid replies of many other, similarly flummoxed Internet professionals--heartening on two counts. Not only did they alleviate my own feelings of inadequacy but they gave me renewed hope for the future of the daily newspaper.

Are Newspapers Becoming Obsolete?

For several years now, there has been a growing perception, both inside and outside journalism, that the daily newspaper as we have known it in this country for two centuries is on the brink of obsolescence.

Daily newspaper circulation has been declining dramatically relative to the population for more than 30 years; fewer daily papers are sold today than in 1960, despite a population increase of more than 50%. Figures released by the Audit Bureau of Circulation show that six of the nation’s 10 largest papers lost circulation during the first quarter of 1997, continuing a trend that began early in the decade. More than 200 daily papers have folded or merged since 1980.

The decline in newspaper readership is especially precipitous among the young. Since 1965, the number of people under 35 who tell surveyors they read a newspaper the day before has plummeted from 67% to less than 30%.

Significantly, the fastest-growing segment of the online population is in the 25-to-34 age group, the precise age range during which most Americans have historically gotten married, had children, bought homes and became voting, tax-paying citizens--what sociologists call “invested in their communities”--and, as a result, began to read the newspaper every day.

The Internet appeals most strongly to young people--especially the very young, those who might otherwise be the next generation of newspaper readers but who are now introduced to the computer at an early age by video games and, increasingly, schoolwork.

Disney opened an entertainment site for children, Disney’s Daily Blast, in April, complete with games, digital toys, coloring books, interactive comic strips with sound, and news and sports stories tailored for the 3-to-12-year-old market. Disney charges $4.95 a month for access to the site, but America Online, the Public Broadcasting Service, the Headbone Zone, Yahoo’s Yahooligans! and several other sites offer free entertainment for children.

Nearly every newspaper reports that visitors to its online site are generally younger--in some cases much younger--than are readers of its print edition. An estimated 65% of the nation’s schools now have access to the Internet, and a study in April by CNN, USA Today and the National Science Foundation found that 56% of the teenagers surveyed had used the Internet to research a school project. Many Web sites have begun selling, giving away or writing term papers to order, thus creating new temptations for college students and new problems for their professors.

The Net is the fastest-growing medium the world has ever seen, and it is likely to become the “most efficient distribution vehicle in the history of the planet,” according to a 142-page study by Mary Meeker, managing director of the Morgan Stanley investment banking firm.

It took 38 years for radio to reach 50 million homes in this country--and 13 years for television to reach the same level of penetration--but Meeker says the Web will do so by next year, five years after it is generally said to have been born (with the introduction of the Mosaic browser, the first real system for accessing and navigating the Internet).

The Internet is expanding so rapidly in part because it reflects the growing diversity and individuality of American society today, much as television reflected America’s “desire for conformity” in the 1950s, says Nick Donatiello, president of Odyssey, a San Francisco-based research firm that specializes in information technology.

Not only is the Net personalized, it is also immediate, interactive and attractive, while most newspapers are none of the above. Even the best newspapers continue to be published only once a day, early in the morning, based on information largely gathered the previous day and not updated until the next day. That’s why many people now go online to get news.

For the second consecutive year, a study by the FIND/SVP research group reported last month that Internet users said their time spent with newspapers, television and magazines had declined as a direct result of their time on the Internet.

Many people who see the Internet as a genuine threat to newspapers are neither computer nerds dazzled by technological wizardry nor entrepreneurs blinded by the promise of big money. There are plenty of both, of course, but many of those convinced of the potential of the Internet have spent most of their careers in traditional journalism.

In 20 years--”maybe 15”--most people will get most of their news on the Internet, says Robin Johnson, who was a top executive with Time Inc. and the Atlantic Monthly before assuming a similar position (which he has since left) with InfoSeek, an Internet search engine.

Newspapers--and magazines and television--could provide much of that online news themselves, though. If Internet professionals don’t have all the answers themselves yet, maybe the traditional media can reinvent themselves on the Web. Maybe they can learn the new technology and adapt it to the values, standards and priorities of good daily journalism.

Indeed, fearful of having their franchise appropriated by cyberspace upstarts, literally thousands of news organizations, print and electronic alike, are trying to do precisely that. National television networks and local radio stations, general and special interest magazines and more than 500 daily papers have all developed online versions of their traditional output. Even many small newspapers--and 70% of the country’s daily newspapers have a circulation of less than 25,000--are now online.

With a few notable exceptions, online sites produced by traditional news organizations are still in their awkward infancy. They do not take full advantage of the interactivity and other features unique to the Net.

Some denizens of the Net say they never will. Traditional journalists, they say, are too arrogant to truly welcome the interactivity of the Web (where readers routinely attack writers and expect a dialogue to ensue); too repressed to embrace the freedom of the Web (where talk about sex is uncommonly frank and often obscene), and too conventional to publish the provocative exchanges so intrinsic to the Web (where almost any viewpoint, no matter how outlandish, is deemed worthy of discussion).

But the overwhelming majority of the newspaper sites are only a year or two old. The people running them are still learning. Online journalism is a new hybrid; no one is quite sure yet exactly how best to do it--including most of the pioneers in the field. Nor has anyone--well, hardly anyone-- figured out to make a profit from it.

Many seemingly Web-savvy people I’ve interviewed have responded to my confessions of ignorance by acknowledging their own ignorance. So I shouldn’t have been so surprised to find that many people far more technologically adroit than I also have some of the same problems at the keyboard and on the Internet that I do. Everything about the Internet is new--and changing, constantly.

When the E-Mail Goes Down

In my ignorance and frustration, I found the most solace--and, I admit it, a perverse pleasure--in what I encountered during the two days I spent at Ground Zero in cyberspace, the Redmond, Wash., headquarters of Microsoft Corp., the software giant.

On my first day there, Paige Prell, the Microsoft public relations person who was serving as my liaison with various corporate executives, couldn’t retrieve any of her e-mail; somehow, her password had disappeared from the system. That night, Michael Kinsley, the editor of Microsoft’s online magazine Slate, told me he had written a story the previous night but had been unable to e-mail it to the office because the system wasn’t functioning.

E-mail is especially critical at Microsoft, where telephones seldom ring and employees e-mail everyone, even colleagues in the office next door. Kinsley says he even conducts most of Slate’s editorial conferences by e-mail.

“When e-mail goes down,” he says, “everyone goes home.”

The next morning, with Prell still unable to retrieve her e-mail, I went off to see Merrill Brown, editor in chief of the online portion of MSNBC, the alliance between Microsoft and NBC News. He wanted to show me an MSNBC story on his desktop computer. But the audio wouldn’t work. We went to the office of one of the top technology people for another demonstration. His computer wasn’t working properly either.

Feeling emboldened, I joked with some of my interview subjects about Microsoft’s various technical problems. I told a couple of them that when I had installed the Microsoft Network on both my office and home computers, it had paralyzed them; I couldn’t turn either of them on or off. The Microsoft folks didn’t sound the least bit surprised when I said that I had been so frazzled and frustrated that when I finally got a Microsoft technician on the line, I had begun screaming and swearing instead of explaining my problem--and the technician had chuckled softly and said, “Let me guess--you just got a Microsoft Network disk in the mail and tried to install it.”

Before leaving Microsoft, I told Prell that I had bought my son a Microsoft game--NBA Full-Court Press--for Christmas and couldn’t get it to work. Like so many computer and software customers, I had spent hours calling--and waiting--for help on Microsoft’s technical support line. I asked if she could find someone in the huge Microsoft complex to give me a hand. She said she would call me in Los Angeles with the name and number of someone to talk to.

Back home, I decided to try Expedia, the online Microsoft travel service that two of the company’s executives had touted to me. I asked Expedia for the cheapest air fares to Rome, Milan or Paris in late June. Expedia responded with a lengthy list of options, all with footnoted references that required considerable translation on my part--and when I was done, as near as I could tell, all I had were fares that expired at the end of March.

I called a travel agent and got a decent fare in 90 seconds.

When a few weeks went by and I hadn’t heard from Prell about Full-Court Press, I called and left a message. Then I remembered what Kinsley had said about e-mail vs. telephones at Microsoft.

I sent her an e-mail.

That was four months ago.

I haven’t heard back yet.

Maybe her e-mail is still down.

David Shaw’s e-mail address is [email protected]

* Jacci Cenacveira and Rebecca Andrade of The Times editorial library assisted with the research for this series.

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Moving to New Media

The Internet is the fastest-growing medium in history. It took 38 years for radio to reach 50 million homes in this country and 13 years for television to do so. Some experts say the Internet will reach that level of penetration in its first five years.

Years to reach 50 million users:

Radio: 38

TV: 13

Cable: 10**

Internet: 5P

* Estimate

** Launch of HBO in 1976 is used as the beginning of cable as an entertainment/advertising medium.

Source: Morgan Stanley technology Research

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Web Sites

These are the names and Internet addresses for the primary Web sites mentioned in today’s stories:

America Online