The panelists in the first session gave us a good grasp of the basic elements of excellent journalism on the Web. As Jack Shafer and Louis Rosetto remarked, excellence requires taking advantage of the new possibilities offered by the Web such as the ability to hear from many different voices and the power it puts in the hands of the public to decide for themselves to which voice they wish to listen. But this must be achieved while maintaining the long-standing values of honesty, fairness and accuracy of information. In addition, web journalists, according to Jonathan Weber, must posses and demonstrate in their stories a deep passion for reporting and writing. Without a grounding in that passion, the other values of journalism will wither.

In developing this new technology, journalists must be especially aware of the relationship between business and content. To David Weir, Denise Caruso, Katherine Fulton and Adam Clayton Powell, this meant that journalists need to have a better understanding of how the business side of the operation works, but they must also create a conscious separation between the two that is apparent to the reader. If practiced correctly, David Talbot suggests that the Web can help to correct many shortfalls of traditional journalism.

The second session put forward sites that John McChesney and others felt embraced these elements of excellent journalism. Someone from each site then explained how that site was developed, what values they tried to impart and any problems they encountered.

For Kevin McKenna, founding editor of New York Times on the Web, providing original content that differs from the newspaper content was essential in making it valuable to the reader:

"When I got into this the beginning of 1995 as one of two journalists from the Times newsroom who was asked to sort of sketch the future of what we might be doing electronically, my colleague and I decided early on that one of the things we had to do was provide original content, because at that point about the worst epithet you could hurl at someone was that ... they were repurposing what was in print, that they didn't understand that it was a new medium.

"So we approached the editor of the Times and we said to him that we wanted to be doing some reporting for the Web site that did not originate in the printed paper. We thought this was going to be the beginning of a long struggle. To our surprise, his immediate response was fine, as long as it's up to New York Times quality -- to which he added, and of course you'll be doing news updates, too, which we thought was going to be round two. We went away and sort of thought to ourselves afterwards, gee, that was easy. Then we woke up the next day and realized that it wasn't easy at all...

"We discovered very quickly that there was more ebb than flow and we were soon doing on average of about two dozen original articles a week for the Web site. But again, doing this without recourse to the real resources of the New York Times, doing it with freelance reporters and a very busy editor of Cyber Times. We've since found that obviously that wasn't sufficient and we've increased those resources...

"Of all of these ... the one I was closest to was the Bosnia project. It was one that I think we hoped would sort of set a benchmark of what we wanted to be doing with originality on-line. It was a project that involved a very extensive multimedia photo essay by the photojournalist [Shiel Perez]... It involved a very ambitious forum to provide interactivity into which we could hopefully draw a discussion of the issues around the war in Bosnia and the peace settlement, and some depth of coverage as well."

Gary Kamiya, Executive Editor, Salon tries to challenge the conventional form of journalism by adopting more of a free forum of writing than traditional media. But traditional values of journalism guide his decisions about content:

"Salon has been a constant series of evolutions, not all of which are planned, and that's one of the joys of working in this medium. In some ways our most notable achievement so far has been to survive, to come over from the core editorial group, coming over from the San Francisco Examiner on this harebrained idea that you can run 8,000 word essays and not follow the conventional wisdom of how you survive putting content on-line. We had huge major internal debates about that, and they to some degree still go on as to whether we can get away with the kind of stuff we're doing...

"I think that one of the things that the mainstream media tends to have is a certain type of mind set in which, like television, there is a creeping degree of speaking [in] a reasonable man's position... I don't know that the New York Times should be the New York Observer, which is a publication that Salon is much closer to with sort of a hornet's nest of squabbling columnists, of irresponsible, hopefully not libelously so, opinions, beautifully written essays, hard reporting, a real wild grab of things... There isn't enough of that. There tends to be a homogenized quality. One of the things that the new media can do is fill that void...

"What we're trying to do at all times at Salon is preserve those old journalistic verities. From my point of view as Executive Editor, there's no difference working in new media from old media... That doesn't affect your editorial judgments day to day as new media editor.

"When you're actually operating content of the new media, it's not any different from operating in content in the old media, with the exception, and maybe this could change, that partly because we're not institutionally beholden, we can be really irreverent and really free swinging, and that is, I think a good thing... The danger is you tip over into sensationalism, which is one of the undercurrents of fear in this discussion, which is dominating all media. But I think there's a way where you can have a tabloid mentality that is also intelligent."

Kim Alexander is President of The California Voter Foundation, which provides a public service of information that can help a citizen make a more informed decision about the candidates they chose to support. While it is not the responsibility of journalists to persuade citizens to be active in our democracy, this site can be a model to the type of public service that news organizations could provide, and to the types of tools that journalists might find helpful in their reporting:

"The California Voter Foundation's work is based on a couple of premises... First is that people are busy. If there's anything you remember from what I say today, please keep this in mind as journalists. People are busy...

"Another is what I like to call the five percent factor. It would be great if everybody was involved and were engaged but I don't think that's going to happen. Fortunately, for democracy to work ... we don't need everybody to be involved. We need maybe five or ten percent of the people at any given time to be paying attention to what our politicians are doing. The public relies greatly on the news media to help them do that job...

"The accomplishment for CVF that I'm most proud of, I think ... is consistency. ... Because we've been doing it [since 1994] people are finally getting used to the idea that hey, you can go on the Internet and find this information.

"As John mentioned, we also produced the first real time campaign finance database... San Francisco was the first jurisdiction in the country to mandate electronic filing of campaign finance data. With that data coming in in a digital format, it only [took] a couple of hours to put it into a database, upload it onto the Internet where it resides today. Anyone can go on-line and search that data and find out in two seconds just about anything you want to know about campaign financing in the San Francisco mayoral election.

"Another project that I'm proud of is our late-contribution watch project from the 1996 election. I know many people here in this room probably subscribe to that service. We wanted to do something with campaign finance data for the state elections in 1996, and I knew from past experience that all these late contributions of $1,000 or more get disclosed with the Secretary of State in the final two weeks, but they stack up into these huge binders that nobody can ever go and look at. So ... we sent a team of researchers to the Secretary of State's office every day with laptops, and they data entered those records onto the laptops, brought them back to our office. We uploaded them every day to our Web sit and e-mailed them out to everybody on our news list. For the first time reporters all over the state, even if they weren't in Sacramento, even if they didn't have the time to plow through those records, they were able to get access to this information and incorporate it into their news coverage...

"Another thing that I'm really happy about for this 1998 election is that we have now an archive of past election information. So, for example, in 1994 we collected platform papers and other documents from 32 people who ran for statewide offices, including many people who are now running for reelection or running for new offices. Let's say you want to see if Dan Lungren, for example, kept his promises that he made as Attorney General in 1994 as a candidate. Well those promises are on our Web site and you can go and look at that and actually evaluate as a voter or as a journalist whether or not he's kept is promises, and other candidates as well.

"So what we're doing is using this technology to create a pubic record. In creating this public record, we are improving accountability in politics tremendously. And no, not everybody cares about this, but enough people do. And I know because thousands of them come to our Web site, that it's going to make a difference.

Jai Singh is responsible for the news gathering on CNET. For him, fact-checking and source verification need to be even more apparent in web journalism because it must prove its credibility to readers:

"CNET is the computer network, which means we have a network of sites, about nine in all on the Web, and we have four TV shows to complement that... I head up one of the network sites called News.Com. .. Our mission is to provide technology news.

"...What I have decided is that I'm not looking for somebody who has multimedia savvy or HTML savvy, but somebody who has the basic understanding of what reporting and editing is all about. If they are recent graduates then they at least should be well versed in what journalism is, and obviously we have a mix of people who have a dozen plus years of journalism experience at the LA Times or the Chronicle, what have you.

"[News.com] launched in September of 1996 and one of the first e-mails that I got, since this is an interactive media and you hear back from readers instantaneously, was to do with a story we had done on ATM, which is a networking technology. The reader's comment was, "Don't blow your techno-weenie credentials the first day." He was referring to the fact that we probably didn't know asynchronous transfer mode, which is the networking equal on ATM from automated teller machines, the other ATM. The reporter actually did know what ATM really meant. The point was ... how could we actually be doing credible journalism on the Web?

"That was followed by a scathing piece in the LA Times several weeks later where the thrust of the article was that in our zeal to publish first we in the new media or on-line media, just publish without verifying and fact checking our stories. What was disconcerting to me was the fact that I had had a conversation with the reporter for about half an hour, and I kept emphasizing the fact that nobody on my team and nobody in my department has been given the marching orders that since we have the means to publish instantaneously, just go ahead and publish, fact checking be damned... When I called the editor of record on that story, tried to explain to him what had actually transpired, he stood by the story, he said, and then he hung up on me.

"Fortunately, Jonathan Weber, who was the technology editor, came back from vacation and the LA Times ran a correction on the story."

"...[More recently], ABC News On-Line just cut a deal with us and they're carrying our technology news on their site. We just cut a deal with Bloomberg, and I'm most happy to report that the New York Times, who had not credited us for a single story in the year and a half of our existence, has given credit to us two weeks in a row for a story on Microsoft DOJ. I suppose they find us credible now. So that's great to know."

Pamela Pfiffner, executive producer of Zdt.com, the on-line companion to Ziff Davis' cable channel on the information industry, agrees that the values of good editing, solid reporting, fact-checking and thorough research do not change when a journalist moves to the Web. But in addition to those responsibilities, he or she needs to think much more about how the information is presented to make it accessible and entertaining:

"Ziff Davis, as some of you may or may not know, is a traditional publisher, been around for more than 50 years... And in the '80s, sold those entire publications and decided to throw in his lot with this new computer stuff. ...Recently, we've decided to start a cable channel devoted to computers, technology, and the Internet. The job that I have is to integrate the Internet in with all of that television programming. So that when we talk about new media in this particular instance, we're talking about broadcast television and the Internet and how those two cross over.

"...Some similarities [to print] are very much there in that content is content, stupid; good editing, good reporting, good fact checking, good research, all of that enters into it. That should be a given.

"However, when you get into new media you have to think a lot more about technology than you used to. I think the print heritage has been very much that there were reporters and there were ink-stained wretches in the back room who magically transformed all your wonderful prose into this thing that you could hold. In my experience, it's not that every reporter out there needs to know how to code a page in HTML... However, you just have to be thinking a lot more about the presentation than you ever have been before.

"I'm currently in the situation where suddenly everyone is saying well we'll just do streaming video... Well, it's not that easy. In fact if you go out and look at a lot of research, watching video on the Internet, there's maybe about 10 percent of people who actually watch video on the Internet because it's the technology. Because if you've got a slow modem, etc., etc., you get a very bad experience.

"One of the things that I wrestle with a lot, which is how to use these tools to their best advantage and how you can really maximize the content that you do have and make it accessible and entertaining and all those other good things.

"Having said that, I love Slate, and I love Salon both. I like going there and reading these long stories. However, people don't spend, in my experience, a lot of time on a single page. They click around a lot. So while I love going to MSNBC and looking at the news content that they have, I get bored if it takes me a long time to open their page. ...It's a beautifully, wonderfully rich graphic page, but it's a pain in the butt, and I end up sort of clicking away and going away from it.

"We really have to keep in mind what the user and viewer experience is. You always have to be thinking about how to write short, I think, write short headlines that captures the eye. We can probably debate this for awhile later, but that's sort of my spiel this morning. As I'm thinking about the fact that we're launching in two weeks, and I have a new Web site that goes up in two weeks. My head is rather consumed with that right now."

Spencer Ante is a former editor at Web Magazine and currently a contributing writer for Wired and the New York Times and an editorial consultant for the Webby Awards. His criteria for excellent journalism on-line is the ability to provide to the public important information that engages the public's thinking:

"You say the words new media and everyone sort of automatically thinks about the Web. But I think the Web is for all its greatness, for all the amazing things it's doing for us, it's still overrated to a large degree. I think e-mail is actually the underrated medium of the present... With e-mail, the cost of distribution is essentially free because all the servers that are transmitting your messages are picking up that cost.

"An example [of excellence in email journalism] is the Fite censorship mailing lists which were started by Dickland McCullough of Carnegie Mellon... The administration at Carnegie Mellon was trying to sensor, I think it was a newspaper, and he started this mailing list around, a discussion of should the university be allowed to sensor this content? It grew into this really robust mailing list with 5,000 or 6,000 readers.

"One of the things it has accomplished in the last two years is this whole debate over the Communications Decency Act. They single-handedly changed the discourse around blocking software, and by revealing that a lot of these technologies were actually censoring a lot of content in Web sites that had information about AIDS or breast cancer, very valuable information that was being censored unknowingly by the people who were using these technologies. That story was e-mail.

"...A more mainstream example of sort of corporate publishing is PC World On-Line, which is distributing like 2.5 million e-mails a day right now. That's like a viable revenue stream. They're getting five to seven cents per impression on that e-mail list, and it's actually growing at a quicker rate than the Web. The e-mail publishing is growing at a rate of 10 percent a month whereas the Web page fees are only growing at a rate of four percent a month.

"So I would say the Web is great, but let's not underestimate the power of e-mail to really change the way that people think and to shape the debate...

"I'll just come back to the Webby Awards... I do think there is a need for basically creating a fire which we all can rally around as a community of on-line content developers or journalists. There's a need for that. There's a need to get together and celebrate what we think is the best of the medium. I think that's why the Webby Awards have taken off, to a large extent.

"So in absence of the Web Magazine, a magazine I used to work at and be an editor, which gave birth to the Webby Awards [and is] no longer there, what we want to do is establish an academy. What we've done this week is we trademarked and established the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences. That's going to be an independent, non-commercial body that's going to fulfill the functions of editorial review and editorial judging for the Webby Awards moving forward in the future. It's still underwritten by IDG, and it's being run out of their conference division right now."

John Carroll, columnist for the West Bay Daily, asked what the panelists had done "to bring your readers into the editorial process and into the discussion."

Kevin McKenna: "We've had a number of on-line discussions that we've started. I think one of our goals, which we haven't done as well in executing as we'd like is to find a way to integrate that more with content so that people are led from reportage to the opportunity to discuss it and vice versa. It's an important part, we think, of what we're trying to do. It's a very hard thing for established media to do well because they're not used to giving up control. It was something we were very uncomfortable with, to say the least. But we've learned a lot from it. I think we're finding ways to do it better."

John McChesney: "One of the things that happened at National Public Radio recently was when the Lewinsky story first broke ... and NPR came on with its coverage, which was essentially the same as what other people were doing. Both programs, All Things Considered and Morning Edition, were inundated with e-mail at a volume they had never seen at National Public Radio before, and it changed the editorial course at NPR. I wasn't privy to the internal discussions, but I could hear what was going on there and I knew about this flood of e-mail that was coming in. It actually had a tremendous impact, and that never would have happened in the days of paper mail."

Spencer Ante: "What's interesting for this discussion today for journalism is that it completely changes the role of the journalist. Instead of being a "reporter" or writer or editor, you become sort of a facilitator.

"The metaphor that I like to use when I organize an on-line discussion with Salon's Table Talk forum [is]... that it's like throwing a party. You've got to invite the right people, get them into the same room and pay attention to them. Tend to them and cultivate them and nurture them. If you don't, they're going to desert you.

"That's one of the lessons of new media, I think, is that people have really finely tuned bullshit filters, because we're very media savvy and growing up in a media saturated age you learn to see through the bullshit really quickly."

Kim Alexander: "It is really important to get feedback, but I would really caution anyone who's looking at doing anything on the Web, if you go forward with any sort of interactive component you'd better have the staff to do it right. If you don't, it can just be a mess. Every discussion needs a guide, you need to have someone who's helping it along. We haven't done that in our site, but we're planning to do it in 1999. What we do is a number of thing to figure out how can we improve our content for voters after each election. We look at our usage statistics to see what kind of records people are looking at, what documents are people looking at, what are they not looking at? We have a guest book where we have people able to post their comments and we look at those. And we're going to be implementing a membership program later on this year and we will be polling our members with this new program on an annual basis to let them help us decide our content development priorities."

Audience Question: "I was struck by the vocabulary being used here today by the panelists, I guess on both panels so far this morning I've heard traffic, marketing analysis, distribution, click-through, eyeballs, strategy, brand identity, page views, niche, usership, and so forth. I wonder if this should be the Committee of Concerned Business Executives, and how the financing of the new media is affecting the journalism, in part because so many are both editors and CEOs or co-founders. I wonder how many people who are working at these sites have equity positions? Can we have a show of hands? And how does that affect the relationship? I don't imagine John Carroll at the Chronicle has an equity position with the family that owns the paper. (Laughter) I was just wondering if you have any comments about how this has affected your view and your practice a journalists."

Unidentified voice: I kind of agree with Louis Rosetto when he said before that the problem of the business model is not specific to new media, it's actually specific to all media. The main threat to good journalism I see right now today in today's society is the increasing centralization and conglomeratizaton of media. This is a trend that's been going on for awhile. Ben Bagdikian used to be dean of this school wrote a very influential book called The Media Monopoly.

"So, for example, you have Disney buying ABC News, and then you have this breakfast cereal executive coming into the LA Times and shutting down Newsday, and the stock price soars. That's a big problem. Where is there, in this pressure to increase shareholder return in these publicly traded companies, where is there room for good journalism? That's the big issue, I think.

"What I think is going to happen in the future is that journalists who want to cover a story over a long period of time are going to be able to use e-mail, as Spencer is saying, to subscribe people to that story, and I'll be able to pay to support that journalist telling me that story in my mailbox over a long period of time. Then we get back to what journalism, I think we'd all like to see it get back to which is continuity, reaching the market that you want to reach, reaching the people who care about the issue that you're covering."

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