did. The site popped up on my screen with color photos of a

perky-looking Darlene and friends. I saw a red logo, too. A small “GP” appeared between “Gramercy” and “Press,” a nice little touch that a real publisher might have tried. I wondered what ambitions MCI had. Might it turn the fictitious GP into a commercial publisher someday? The screen said Gramercy was “The World’s First Virtual Publishing House,” and across the top I saw color photos of Darlene and friends, all looking as real as ever. If I’d been impatient for a hard sell, I could have clicked immediately on items such as “networkBusiness” or “MCI Telecommunications, Inc.”

But like the rest of the cosmos, I was more keen on reading some virtual gossip from virtual humans. In a primitive way, reminiscent of many a best-seller, a teaser led me on. I learned that the people of Gramercy were “working on secret projects, curt memos, random thoughts, Machiavellian power plays,” and that I might “even browse a clandestine love letter or two about to be sent via e-mail across the corridor.”

So I clicked, with much anticipation, on “Gramercy Press.” Against a dark, purplish-blue sky I saw a semiornate, low-rise office building, the same one featured in the TV commercial. Not to leave anything to chance, a caption told me about tweeds and patches and old pipes _and_ the fact that “every one—from the receptionist to the president himself—is online via networkMCI Business.” Despite the clichés such as the stereotypical reference to tweeds, this site was clearly showing far more imagination than the usual WWW area did.

“Now,” the screen told me, “click on any window and you’ll start to get a feel of the inside workings of a major New York publishing concern.”

I chose a pane on the top floor and saw Darlene near her keyboard, smiling away and looking as if I’d caught her in the middle of an intense gossip session. The screen suggested that I click for audio. I did and downloaded a short snippet. “I love technology,” she said in a high-pitched, girlish voice, and giggled a little nervously as if to tell the world, “Hey, I’m a real person, not an actress taping an ad.”

The text on the screen was credibly self-promotional: “I’m a combination of a staff psychiatrist, gopher, organizer, coffee maker, ruffled-feather soother, astrologer, party organizer, invitation sender, flower orderer, delivered-lunch acceptor, and philosopher. Oh yes, I also disseminate messages. A job made infinitely easier thanks to e-mailMCI. I threw out those little pink message pads. e-mailMCI is so much more efficient. I just click on my computer and the message gets to the right person instantly. Whether they call back is up to them. Hey, I can’t be their conscience, mother, and etiquette professor too. I wear enough hats. And I have many aptitudes. For instance, I was college skiing champ. You didn’t know that about me. Nor did you know I have a master’s degree in medieval literature. Or that Ellen deRosset is going to need an editorial assistant. Of course, she doesn’t know it yet either.”

I moved on to Darlene’s e-mail by clicking on, yes, her monitor. And suddenly I was getting another pitch from MCI in the cleverest of ways—I saw a screen shot of a menu from e-mailMCI, complete with such commands as “Compose,” “Forward,” and “Reply.”

Beneath the menu appeared a message list:

E. deRosset Short Story Submissions C. Bruno Excellent Proposition R. Gales Cover Art Submissions M. Dragelov Interesting Facts P. Hoffman Free at Last

I opened the e-mail. Ellen deRosset was complaining that “My office has more manuscripts than the Library of Alexandria—I’m running out of room for me. Could people submit their stories over the Internet instead of through the mail?” Reginald Gales wrote that he’d sent out a fax to computer artists, asking for submissions; and in fact MCI was offering to post the works of electronic artists, not just writers. Under the subject line “Excellent Proposition,” Curtiss Bruno asked: “Hey Darlene, want to come by and check out the romance section of our newest catalog?” Funny. The TV commercials had led me to believe he might be tiring of the chase. Marta Dragelov passed on some funny trivia from a book she was researching. Peter Hoffman announced that he would be out of the office the next week but would be keeping in touch with electronic mail.

So, yes, I could read the same e-mail as Darlene could. But that still wasn’t full interactivity. I wanted a two-way, and the “Compose” command intrigued me; perhaps I could e-mail the crew behind the Darlene character. I wrote that I was a real writer, working on a real book, for a real publisher; could they please tell me what kind of responses the people at Gramercy Press were getting over the Internet? _And how about Darlene?_

“What’s she like?” I was thinking. “How’d those people choose her? Does she enjoy computers? Has she been on the Net?” Once I established contact with the virtual Darlene’s keepers, perhaps I could find out.

Having already snooped at Darlene’s e-mail, I went on to the offices of the other characters. Ellen deRosset, a dark-haired woman dressed in black, confided that she had corrected her seventh-grade teacher’s grammar. “I read _War and Peace_ when I was fifteen. The complete works of Balzac before I was twenty-five. I think you get the picture. So I am not happy that I was given the assignment to edit this ‘women in sports’ book. I dislike sports rather intensely. The only sport I know anything about, really, is fencing. But one must be flexible these days, and the MCI Business software makes this assignment easier to handle, if not more palatable.”

Reginald Gales told me how MCI’s e-mail and conferencing services came in handy. One of his authors lived on a caboose in Wyoming, while another wrote from a houseboat in Florida; “he once had a shark bite off his TV antenna.”

Marta Dragelov, the fact checker, was an avid user of MCI’s news-flash service, which crammed her computer with such items as, “India Asks Phone Firms to Set Up Local Factories”—actual news stories that I could see while clicking on them. Peter Hoffman was away at home and working in his pajamas. Martin Banks, the technophobic editor, said he was “being tutored on the wonders of MCI electronic office ephemera by none other than Miss Ellen deRosset.” He hoped that she would notice his new pair of wing tips.

The real payoff for readers was in Curtiss Bruno’s office. Wearing a striped shirt and a tie and looking like an incurable office politician, he nevertheless held a hand over his mouth as if to say: “Maybe I’d better shut up before I spill too much.” Oh, Curtiss, why bother? I could tour an electronic version of the not-quite-completed winter catalogue—with listings of fiction, visual arts, poetry, and nonfiction.

All categories carried dates older than the Web area itself—MCI was apparently relying on imaginary contributors to prime the pumps. “Ivana diTommaso’s” background just seemed too _New Yorker_-ish. She had “grown up in Bologna, Italy, and Grosse Pointe, Michigan” and had “developed from a quiet film student” to “one of America’s fine short story writers.” If she existed, the electronic catalogue at the Library of Congress had yet to note it when I made a short detour by way of my software’s task-switching capability. Not that I trusted the catalogue. A branch of Random House had published my first book, _The Silicon Jungle_, yet it was missing from the LC catalogue that day; and for all I knew, maybe the librarians had also neglected the accomplished Ms. diTommaso. I charitably allowed for the fact that she just might exist.

Her story, “The Legend of Wendell County,” told how a county records keeper had become a community grandmother who, not content to record births, deaths, and divorces, tried her hand at marriage counseling and other social workish pursuits—until one day she lost her way in winter and turned into something else, a ghost. The bottom of the page carried an authentic-looking “© 1994 Ivana diTommaso.”

I moved on. “The Tree House” was a story from Katy Rudder, a member of “the first Peace Corps class ever assigned to China, where she is teaching English at Leshan Teachers College in the Sichuan Province.” Based on what I was reading, MCI’s artistic tastes—or its ad agency’s—were corporately wholesome. And so were its contributors. I doubted that Gramercy would have been the best place for the young Burroughs or Kerouac.

Perhaps this would change, maybe Gramercy would grow more adventurous with time, but right now I wasn’t sanguine in that regard. The nonfiction area was a real loss with just one title, of a harmless, theological type. I doubted that this would be the place for, say, Seymour Hersh or Robert Caro. Like the writing, the art looked competent and maybe much better, but, again, safely within corporate parameters.

The most cautious contributors were MCI’s lawyers, or whoever else had written the legalese for one Web site. All writers and artists had to send in releases saying they wouldn’t sue MCI for using accidentally similar material. The lawyers warned, “All work that is submitted electronically over the Internet needs to be accompanied by a hard copy of the release form, sent in separately by postal mail. We will not look at any work placed on our server until we have received the hard copy of the release form. All files on the server older than 14 days, for which we have not received a release, will not be reviewed....” I remembered the essay on theology. It was uninspired enough for an attorney other than Scott Turow to have written it, and sure enough, the author’s note said he was “happy with the practice of law.”

Despite the less-than-striking short stories and the soporific essay, I loved the sparkle of Gramercy Press as a whole. I recalled an area on the Web known as Bianca’s Smut Shack. Its creators let you get inside the head of a virtual woman, let you know what books she read, what movies she watched, what records she listened to, and you could add your own opinions. At the time I’d told the Shack crew, “Watch out, folks. Don’t be surprised if a big company creates characters in an ad where _everyone_ buys the right products.” Well, it had happened. And MCI and its advertising agency had done many good things that people with their resources could more easily accomplish.

Building Notre Dame, thousands of workers had pieced together the stone, fashioned the gargoyles, assembled the stained-glass windows. And the MCI Web area, while hardly art, was somewhat like a cathedral. The area’s masterminds had bungled in some ways, but they had used sheer staff power to toil over countless details.

I was sorry when Mark Pettit told me that some Real People in Publishing had hated Gramercy Press. Didn’t they get it? Granted, the publishing company was stereotypical to the point of being self-satirizing. But so what? I was no more expecting MCI to be a first-rate publisher than I was expecting Random House to lay fiber-optic cable.

As a display of the Web’s potential to attract a mass audience, of course, the Gramercy endeavor had triumphed. For consumer business on the Net to take off, ads would have to be a complete departure from those on television, and MCI had done just that—even if it was able to benefit from characters from the older medium. Many small-timers could never have discovered an actress as perfectly suited to play Darlene as Katy Selverstone was. This was a real coup. MCI was brilliantly drawing in a big crowd through a skillful interplay of television, print, and the Net.

Selverstone herself had become a living ad for MCI, drawing stare after stare as she walked down the Manhattan streets. Her Gramercy role was a real tribute to her acting ability. _Entertainment Weekly_ described her as not “much of a gadget-head. ‘I’ve got a 12-inch, black-and-white TV that emits a faint gaseous odor,’ she says. ‘And I have to change channels with a pair of pliers.’” The word from MCI was that she’d just bought a computer and would herself be on the Net. Advertisers hired models today on the basis of looks and I wondered if, in the future, they would consider the ability to give good chat online.

A major problem, however, arose with this scenario in MCI’s case. While I hadn’t asked for an interview or e-mail from the real Darlene, I had yet even to hear from her handlers after six weeks. These people had wooed me with a first-class Web area and encouraged me to write in, and yet they had then ignored me except for a little boilerplate from their Darlene-bot, who said she was busy coping with “emergencies.” The MCI media crew reinforced my skepticism; only after a series of phone calls was I able to pry basic information. On a day when Pettit solemnly promised he’d talked to me, he was off holding a press conference for the _Wall Street Journal_ and the other usual suspects without alerting me about the postponement. Clearly this was a big company focused on other big companies, and I wondered if the small merchants in the Web area might suffer if they entrusted their fates to MCI. I myself was not just a writer. I made it clear that I was also a customer of MCI Mail, an electronic mail service to which I had subscribed for a decade. Perhaps someday I might even want a Web area through MCI. And this was the treatment I got?

If MCI slighted me—a writer-customer who spoke out in print and on the Net, and who had many friends there—how would it treat the Larry Grants of the future? I thought of the elusive, virtual character who had asked me to write to her. In a metaphorical sense, small merchants might futilely spend their days searching for Darlene. Now I wondered about Bob Lilienfeld. How was he coming along with his own information request? Was there _any_ chance that White Rabbit might end up in an electronic mall after all? Lilienfeld, albeit not a mall booster, was in many ways a good prospect since he was so Net oriented and could appreciate a good deal. Why, he even owned stock in MCI.

Efficiently, however, MCI had alienated Bob Lilienfeld. Just like me, he had not heard a peep out of the company, even after filling out a form for his two months of trial services. He had followed up with three e-mail notes to an address set aside for prospects like him. I told MCI’s media people about this mini-debacle and was assured that someone would contact Lilienfeld. But after several weeks, no one had. MCI was nicely apologetic, of course. Mark Pettit and colleagues reminded me of the huge number of people who had replied to the Gramercy Press ad. They said, too, that MCI technical people were busy at work answering questions, while creative types handled the correspondence for Darlene. But they were missing the point. This was a massive advertising campaign, and they should have planned for success as well as failure.

The issue _should_ not have had anything to do with corporate size. MCI could have requested zip codes and states and sorted out Darlene’s e-mail in that way—for area sales reps to answer if her handlers in New York were swamped. In fact, the form that Lilienfeld filled out did ask for his postal address. It also inquired, “What interests you?” so that, during the two-month trial, MCI could mail him news stories through the new automatic clipping service. “You can choose any topic: your competition’s advertising, the future of your industry, or southwestern cooking, anything,” MCI had assured him. And yet, after six weeks, he hadn’t received a single call or piece of literature.

As if that weren’t enough of an outrage, MCI’s fees might overwhelm many small business people. MCI wanted to charge some $2,000 a month for getting them on the World Wide Web—or at least several times what many independent malls would have billed. Yes, MCI talked about adding value through its brand name and through customer draws such as directory services for the Net and for voice. It would even line up copywriters for the storefronts. But what good would this do merchants whose volumes simply did not justify such expenditures? Pettit reminded me that a quarter-page listing in a phone directory cost $2,000. But that wasn’t true in many areas, and most merchants did not take out that much space anyway. Even then the typical business person might hire an extra clerk, and perhaps have money left over for advertising with a smaller cybermall. That, of course, was projecting into the future. After all, even Larry Grant wasn’t grossing more than $15,000-20,000 a year at the time, and the Lilienfelds had a long climb ahead to reach that level.

Perhaps MCI would learn. I still loved the sparkle of the Gramercy area and hoped that it would thrive in the end. Regardless of my doubts and frustrations, I hadn’t anything against the people of MCI, especially Mark Pettit, who, despite his absentmindedness, had actually been more helpful than the others. MCI wasn’t Canter and Siegel. It hadn’t disrupted Usenet. As long as it paid its own way and did not take advantage of its Net connections in ways that stifled competition—Washington needed to monitor MCI closely—then it could actually help the average Net user. The greater the volume on the Net, the greater would be the virtual pipeline and the lower the cost for everyone. So, far from disliking MCI’s interest in the commercial promise of the Net, I still saw plenty of potential here. MCI simply needed to understand the obvious. If its electronic marketplace were to succeed, then the company must price its services more realistically and not keep customers searching for Darlene.

Federal Express and Right-O-Way: Absolutely, Positively on the Net

A FedEx woman called me up and asked what the people in Memphis could do to retain my business, which had plummeted to almost zero volume. “You’ve given me great service,” I said, thinking of all the foot-to-throttle occasions when FedEx had picked up manuscripts on deadline. “But you see, I’m on the Internet nowadays. _Everything_ for my current book project goes ever the wire.” I was working on a guide telling how to lobby for one’s political beliefs online, and the publisher had even received the book proposal via the Net. Lots of people were doing the same, not just with the Net but with commercial services and fax. On legal lists, some lawyers were debating the validity of electronic mail for business matters, but the new technology would quiet the discussion soon enough when foolproof, digital signatures could establish the identity of the sender.

No one needs to weep for FedEx, United Parcel Service, and the rest, however. The typical computer is a medium-sized box full of parts that come in much smaller boxes, such as a disk drive or a modem. And, as shown by the thickness of _Computer Shopper_ and other magazines that cater to computer users buying from afar, FedEx and similar services are thriving. That is just one example. High-tech companies, especially the network kind, want reputations for reliability and fast turnarounds. They love the FedEx slogan: “When it absolutely, positively, has to be there overnight.” Courier services are godsends for corporations that rely on just-in-time delivery to reduce inventories of spare parts. If nothing else, this principle appeals to manufacturers with slim inventories. Also, more and more people are working at home. At the same time, upscale consumer magazines abound with ads touting merchandise via express, everything from steaks to flowers.

The real question, then, isn’t how to downsize but rather how to cope with the deluge of business in small packages. And Federal Express views the Internet as among the more promising of many possibilities.

For years, FedEx used its own network to set up computer links through which high-volume, Fortune 500 companies could request pickups, track shipments, and receive invoices. First, FedEx communicated with mainframes. Then it began supplying some customers with personal computers; eventually, some companies shipping as few as three packages a day could qualify. “We started with the biggest customers first and then extended that service to smaller and smaller companies,” said Robert Hamilton, a marketer at FedEx dealing with information matters. The next move was supplying tracking software through which people could use their own machines to dial up FedEx. Step by step, FedEx was working to get almost _all_ customers online to its computers—even the operators of small home businesses.

The Internet could play an important role here because it is the closest thing to a universal computer network. By the mid-1990s people in the air freight business caught on to the advantages of the Net over the proprietary networks in many cases. The Internet reached scores of countries, no small advantage in an internationally oriented business, and planners could use the Net’s volume to help slash the costs of telecommunications _and_ improve service to customers. Right-O-Way, a freight forwarder in Tustin, California, was among the Net pioneers. Back in 1992 the company had figured out how to use customers’ personal computers to print out bar code labels.

With portable radio-frequency scanners linked to the firm’s mainframe, Right-O-Way’s workers could track shipments for customers—could, in other words, offer the same services that Ex could. Right-O-Way’s customers dialed up the company directly rather than through the Internet. But in 1994, Martin Hubert, vice president of information systems, hooked Right-O-Way into the Net for customers wanting to use it. He spent just $1,000 on additional UNIX software, modems, network setup charges, and programming time, and $350 a month in Internet-related bills.

“Some customers have tried it already,” Hubert said. “We have sales people use the Internet to access shipping data. Our advanced overseas partners can access our computer directly for e-mail, tracking, and tracing. Customers like BMW, ClothesTime, and Packard Bell access our computer and save money on long-distance charges from overseas.”[2.7] Those companies could reach the Right-O-Way computer directly, getting immediate answers while they were online. Using the Net, they could even schedule shipments. Right-O-Way told me that it protected account numbers by requiring customers to use passwords that they received through sales reps and ways other than the Internet.

What’s more, the company served even customers having only the most basic of Internet connections. Yes, you could Telnet into the Right-O-Way computer system on the Internet—could issue commands as if you were at a keyboard at headquarters. But if you lacked Telnet capabilities and didn’t mind the delay, you could also send electronic mail messages in the appropriate format to track shipments or issue pickup orders.[2.8]

Around the same time, FedEx and other industry giants were gearing up to do business on the Internet. The Net, of course, wasn’t the only possibility. Federal Express by then was an old hand at using its own network, which at the time accounted for more than 50 percent of the packages shipped. It was also distributing Windows and Mac software to enable tracking through the FedEx net. Just the same, in December 1994, after having earlier experimented with the Net for the distribution of press releases, FedEx turned to the Internet’s World Wide Web as a way for customers to track packages. Within FedEx’s Web area, they could key in the number of the package and get the latest information.

I checked out the Web service. At www.fedex.com I saw “FedEx” in big purple and orange letters, along with a short, easy menu that led me to electronic forms. A detour offered “Interesting Facts about FedEx!” It was the “world’s largest express transportation company,” had 1994 revenues of $8.5 billion, employed “more than 505,515 worldwide,” served 191 countries, owned more than 400 aircraft ranging from 32 Fokker F-27s to 5 Airbuses and 13 McDonnell Douglas MD-11s, operated “more than 32,560 vehicles, and shipped an average of more than 2 million packages each day.” Another menu item could tell me about pickup availability. If I typed in the time I would have a shipment ready to go, my zip code, and the destination code, among other items, then FedEx would tell me how soon it could deliver the package using Priority Overnight Service or alternatives.

Right now, however, I wanted to learn the whereabouts of a test package—containing nothing more than Robert Hamilton’s business card—that went out under airbill number 50044562. It was a no-brainer. I chose “Select Track a FedEx Package” and keyed in the number. Almost immediately I learned when a courier had picked up the package and when it had left Memphis. And eventually the Web would pass on other facts such as the name of the driver at the destination, the delivery time, and who signed for the package. An idea hit me. When you filled out an express form in the future, perhaps you could give both your recipient’s e-mail address and your own. Via the Net, a service could tell the other person that a package was on the way—and after it arrived, you’d automatically receive a receipt.

Even as the FedEx area existed now, however, it was serving customer needs well. Yes, I appreciated the flash of MCI’s efforts, and I understood why Darlene and friends were attracting many more people than the courier company was right now. But compared to MCI, FedEx left me feeling _better_. Those modest little electronic forms, the ones that would let me track packages and check out Ex’s service availability by location and time, treated the customers as individuals and responded in seconds. MCI, however, ignored Bob Lilienfeld, who, disgusted, later sold his stock.

On top of everything else, MCI, which had vastly more programming talent than FedEx did, had missed out on some major opportunities for interactive software. I could imagine a small company keying in a description of its telecommunications and network requirements and getting a series of at least basic recommendations. On a package-by-package basis and in the most private of ways, FedEx was doing this already—since its forms queried you about your shipping needs of the moment and then told you what services were available. The people at MCI weren’t dumb. They could turn around their operation in a flash—they might have done so by the time you read this—but in terms of customer service FedEx was clearly the winner right now.

“Five years from now,” said Robert Hamilton, “35 or 40 percent of the customers connected to FedEx could be using the Internet.” His company stood a good chance of saving millions in annual communications costs and the expenses of staffing phones. “The big factor is how individuals are connected today,” he said. “With CompuServe and America Online galloping in the direction of the Internet, maybe that will happen sooner rather than later.” FedEx would let customer usage, not official corporate policy, drive its use of the Net, and that is exactly how it should be. One way or another the Net would definitely figure in its plans. The only question was, “How much?”

The big need now, of course, was for customers to be able to key in their account numbers and get immediate pickups. FedEx did face some challenges here. FedEx needed to blend the Internet into its existing network of computers, and this complicated the security issues. FedEx wanted to make certain that a cyberthief couldn’t go on a joyride with an illegally obtained account number of a customer. So it was evaluating security-enhanced software from CommerceNet, a California organization that helped put businesses on the Net. Meanwhile, we customers could not use the Net to schedule shipments through Federal Express. FedEx had offered a temporary solution: we could at least download software that let us call up the company directly, or we could reach FedEx via America Online or another commercial network. That would do for the moment.

Mulling over what I’d seen and heard up to now, I could not escape three conclusions. First, it was clear that computer networks could be a help, not a threat, to delivery companies that were trying to upgrade service. No longer would I have to wait for an operator to schedule a pickup or check on shipments from FedEx. The second conclusion was broader: The Net often could be good for corporations of _all_ sizes, not just Fortune 500 firms like FedEx. Right-O-Way had staked out its own place in cyberspace by going for the simplest solution—Telnet and electronic mail—rather than worrying first about the World Wide Web. The company could add the Web later. On the Internet, with its inherent economies for the Right-O-Ways of this world, “smaller” didn’t have to mean “backwards.”

The third conclusion about these case histories resulted from my comparisons of MCI and the courier companies, and it transcended the fact that they were in different industries. Even on the Internet, good customer service would have to be a company’s first priority and counted even more than the technology per se. Oh, you could use electronic forms. But unless you programmed the forms to provide the right services—rather than simply trying to sell The Product and awe the customers—you might actually alienate the people you were trying to befriend. MCI didn’t understand this sufficiently. FedEx and Right-O-Way did.

Intel: How the Net Helped Turn an Advertising Sticker into a Warning Label

The Internet, of course, can hurt as well as help business. Well populated with skeptical academics—whose postings often find their way onto the screens of equally skeptical journalists—the Net is a good place to learn about scams. Legitimate companies, of course, needn’t worry: They will benefit as word of their successful products spreads, and the Net excels as a conduit for rumor control. Should there ever be another Tylenol scare, you can bet that publicists will use the Net to get the truth out. Even legitimate businesses, however, can feel the wrath of the Net if they err—as Intel, the chip maker, found out in the ugliest of ways after it released the Pentium chip.

The Pentium chip was the new flagship product, the speedster that would let PCs impinge on minicomputer territory. But that wasn’t all. Intel envisioned the Pentium as the perfect chip for computers aimed at the home market. No longer would Mom, Pop, and The Kids poke along with computers weaker than those at the office. Thanks to Intel, they would enjoy glitzy cartoons, educational programs, and other multimedia offerings in full glory on their machines at home. Intel launched a major TV campaign and persuaded scores of computer makers to adorn their boxes and ads with “Intel Inside” stickers. Intel was looking ahead to millions of dollars of Christmas-related sales. At the time, I suspect, the Internet didn’t figure that prominently in Intel’s plans. Its Net area was hardly as dazzling or as ambitious as those of many other companies. That would change.

The trouble started when a mathematics professor in Virginia found that under certain conditions, the Pentium chip would make mistakes in arithmetic. There at Lynchburg College, Dr. Thomas Nicely couldn’t believe his screen. To his amazement, he was able to verify that the chip, not the human, was at fault here. In October 1994 the professor’s “Bug in the Pentium” memo went out over the Internet. It circulated rapidly from mailing list to mailing list, from newsgroup to newsgroup, as well as on commercial nets such as CompuServe and Prodigy.

Pentium-hostile messages flew back and forth between scientists, corporate executives, consultants, and other influential people, who, thanks to the Internet, could share complaints more efficiently than ever. Intel tried some damage control via the Net and in press statements. The heat reached the point where the head of Intel asked a underling to issue an apology and a technical explanation. The message betrayed corporate panic, pure and simple. “I am posting from my home system,” Richard Wirt, Director of Software Technology, prefaced a weekend note. And then came an “I am truly sorry” message from Andy Grove, President of Intel. In various statements Intel assured customers that the average computer user would typically run across the problem once every 27,000 years. The official line was that nontechnical people needn’t worry. Intel announced it would replace chips _if_ people could show that the defect could harm their work.

That still didn’t placate the Net and the media. Netwise reporters at papers such as the _Washington Post_ and _New York Times_ and at _Newsday_ warned the thousands of Christmas shoppers who were about to buy $2,000 Pentium machines. Billions of dollars were at stake here. Computer makers had already moved millions of Pentium machines, and IBM came out with a statement saying that it would replace defective chips—even though Intel kept claiming that the nontechnical need not worry. It didn’t help when shoppers learned that Intel knew about the Pentium’s defects as early as June.

What most threatened the Pentium, however, may have been the humor. It started on the Net and, via mailing lists such as On-Line News, reached major newspapers. David Letterman started cracking jokes. Politicians and chips had something in common. If still quite alive when Letterman ridiculed it, the Pentium was headed toward the emergency room afterward—given the speed with which the story was traveling around. On the Net itself, and on the front pages, typical Pentium humor went something like this:

Q. “How many Pentium designers does it take to screw in a light bulb?”

A. “1.99904274017, but that’s close enough for nontechnical people.”

Q. “What do you get when you cross a Pentium PC with a research grant?”

A. “A mad scientist.”

Q. “What’s another name for the “Intel Inside” sticker they put on Pentiums?”

A. “The warning label.”

Maintaining to the end that this was more of a marketing problem than a technical one, Intel relented. It agreed to replace chips for free without interrogating the public. What’s more, Intel expanded its presence on the Net. It now offered a nice area on the World Wide Web with items ranging from product descriptions to job announcements. Still, this fiasco aside, Intel had a good reputation for quality control, and by not shrinking from the Net community, it was responding correctly.

Another major lesson should also have sunk in among marketers of all kinds—beyond the obvious fact that the Internet could spread news of flawed products. Customers throughout the world could use the same channels to find out about geographically based price gouges. If a software firm charged reasonable prices in the United States but boosted price tags for Europeans, then the Net would spread the word. Software companies might not appreciate this immediately, but sooner or later they would. This was especially true of companies sending their products over the Net. The Internet Adapter, the product that had proven to be so good to my wallet, would have cost me $25 even if I’d lived in Antarctica or New Zealand. I wondered how long it would be before the traditional vendors of shrink-wrapped software would understand this lesson and stop squeezing customers outside the United States. Even with the expenses of middle people and translation factored in, the prices of some American software products were too high in Europe. Consumerism on the Net just might make the marketplace more sane.

Other Hazards For Business People

Not surprisingly, the old sixties people saw the Internet as a victory of smallness over big corporations. Little companies could use the Net in new and imaginative ways and woo prospects thousands of miles away. Some enthusiasts promoted the Net as a powerful weapon for individuals who hated life in sluggish, bloated corporations.

Still, the Net might not always be a Nirvana for small entrepreneurs. Consider the Lilienfelds. What if toy companies decided to sell on the Net directly, for example? The Lilienfelds themselves could still fare well since they were working hard to become known for personal service. For example, if a toy weren’t shown online, Bob might even scan in a photo from a wholesaler’s catalogue and e-mail it to an interested buyer. And he and his wife were planning to make themselves a conspicuous presence in relevant newsgroups, while respecting netiquette. But not all of the small merchants would be as astute and dedicated. I suspected that many bankruptcies lay ahead.

Other problems might hit large as well as tiny companies. Many customers refused to give their credit card numbers online; in fact, many stores didn’t even _want_ them. The Net wasn’t entirely secure. Theoretically, snoops in a number of locations could intercept orders and pick up the MasterCard or VISA numbers with software that looked for common data associated with credit cards. I regarded this as a temporary problem. Lilienfeld had dealt with it nicely by letting people—at least those in the United States—phone in their credit card numbers for free. The numbers would remain safe in White Rabbit’s computers, ready for future transactions. Besides, as Lilienfeld pointed out, it wasn’t worth the trouble for thieves to keep a tab on small stores like his.

Bigger businesses, however, were right to worry, and solutions were on the way. Popular browsers such as Netscape, for example, were coming with security features. Customers would be able to effortlessly transmit their credit card numbers in encoded form.

What about the problem of customers without sufficient funds to pay for merchandise? Some Web merchants could almost instantly verify that a customer had enough money in a credit account. The process would be even easier if companies such as Microsoft followed through with plans to team up with credit card companies. But that still left another worry for customers—privacy.

If you use old-fashioned paper money, your transactions aren’t traceable. With electronic money—or with regular credit or conventional debit cards—they might be. What if you were a gay woman, lived in a small Arkansas town, and enjoyed lesbian literature? Or suppose that in the future you were caught up in a divorce and your wife employed a cyberdetective to snoop on your spending habits? DigiCash, a company in Amsterdam, thought it had a solution in the form of anonymous electronic money that you could spend without being traced. Only your digital banker would know for sure. The possibility, of course, gave fits to tax collectors throughout the world. It was one of the reasons why bureaucrats in the United States had lobbied so hard for industry to adopt the Clipper chip, which allowed federal snoops to break its codes. Clearly, however, the Clipper effort could _harm_ U.S. companies. Suppose foreign governments used a similar approach—making it easier to steal commercial secrets from American-owned multinationals?

Still another threat to business is from people who might spy on or change data on corporate systems. Hackers got into General Electric computers containing secrets. The solution to these electronic thefts, in many cases, was stronger “firewalls”—electronic gateways between public and private areas. In some instances, however, the threat was exaggerated. Yes, in theory, hackers could turn your home phone into a pay phone or make off with your corporate password or spy on your electronic mail. And some hated commercial activities on the Net and were ready to act. But by far, these were exceptions: most of the better hackers were benign—they saw themselves more as scholars than as snoops and saboteurs. Indeed, old-timers would not use the word “hackers” to describe the malevolent; no, they were “crackers.”

Ironically, on the Net, the real worry isn’t hackers but snoopy competitors, who, without necessarily breaking the law, can find out information about prices and new products much more efficiently than before. A rival phone company has paid thousands and thousands of visits to the MCI area on the Web. This must be going on constantly. Earlier, Digital Equipment Corporation offered software demonstrations over the Net and found that its competitors were tying the machines up. More scrupulously, companies could use powerful searching tools such as the Lycos on the Web to seek out files mentioning rivals’ products. They could also send the names of rivals to a computer at Stanford University. And then whenever a company was mentioned in a major Usenet newsgroup, an electronic clipping service would send the information back to them at no charge. A careless engineer or marketer could jeopardize thousands or millions in investments. The answer, of course, is to educate people about the risks.

Not so controllable is the risk of companies using the Net to troll for unfavorable mentions of rivals—grist for negative advertising. There is only one solution: make better products or give better service.

* * * * *

Of the goods and services discussed here, a major kind is conspicuously missing so far: entertainment. Some of the best is free. Just ahead you’ll find a favorite of many Netfolks—the Internet Underground Music Archive, from which you can download free samples from top hits as well as surprises from new musicians.

CHAPTER THREE

EntertaiNet: A Few Musings on Net.Rock, Leonardo da Vinci and Bill Gates, Bianca’s Smut Shack, and David Letterman in Cyberspace

Don’t count on the Ugly Mugs pushing Billy Joel off the charts, or even showing up at your closest record store.

They’re zany, avant-garde musicians whose work is a cross between Frank Zappa and freakish, carnival rock—not the stuff of the Top 40. But Jeff Patterson, a thin, pale guitarist with a fondness for old jeans and green-topped sneakers, can still spread the word about himself and the other Mugs. Their music is on the Internet. Fans as far off as Turkey and Japan can dial the Internet Underground Music Archive run by Patterson and his “co-czar,” Rob Lord. Hundreds of musicians are suddenly in cyberspace. For just $100 a year they can pay IUMA to post cuts from their music, complete with information on how you can send away for the CDs and tapes. In fact, some have even posted complete songs to the Net for free.

Tens of thousands of Netfolk a week dial up IUMA, making 200,000 page-accesses—perhaps a third of the attention that _Playboy_ gets, but still one of the best numbers on the Web. That’s no small feat: The archive more or less started in a tiny room with a bare lightbulb dangling from the ceiling, and it is still a low-budget operation run by two information science majors.

IUMA is just one of many delights on the Net for techies and technophobes alike. Entertainment and culture are taking off in a major way in cyberspace just when clueless Snubbites are deriding the Net as artless. I can enjoy gifted but unheralded performers, from reggae artists to banjo players. The New Zealand Symphony is online with a digitized rendition of the national anthem down there. Imagine the possibilities for fans of classical music in the future—the chances to hear live performances of Tchaikovsky directly from Moscow, or enjoy classical Chinese music from Peking or Taipei. Net.radio is already here. WYXC, for example, a station at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, sends rock music into the ether twenty-four hours a day.

Running software called RealAudio, owners of deluxe home computers can hear top-ten rap from an Internet site in South Korea, astrological forecasts from England, and selected programs from ABC News, National Public Radio, the C-SPAN cable network, the radio version of the _Christian Science Monitor_, the National Press Club, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, and a wealth of other draws whenever they want—even weeks or months after the original broadcasts.

Just a mouse click on the right Web address conjures up a Daniel Schorr commentary, or a feature about the Illinois reporter whom the mob supposedly buried in concrete, or scads of other NPR offerings that I wish I could have enjoyed when they first aired. I don’t have to bother with tricky downloads of files containing the sound. This happens on its own.

RealAudio sounds rather muffled right now, at least on my computer, as if the technology is a throwback to 1920s radio. But sooner or later it will make FM stereo seem antediluvian.

Consider, too, the diversity of programming from grassroots people who can broadcast at a fraction of the costs of even peanut-whistle stations. Thousands of mom-and-pop sites—unencumbered by the Federal Communications Commission, unless the nanny faction wins out in D.C. and cracks down on the Net—may be online in the next year or two. What happens when unpopular political beliefs spread around this way? Will the Oklahoma City tragedy be invoked to squelch RealAudio and equivalents?

Cheerier possibilities may arise. Someday you might go hiking in the middle of the Rockies and be able to tune in performances and talk shows from all over the world through a net.satellite link; never mind the limits of the local radio stations.

Even video transmission will be routine over the Net or a successor. And then what? When Michael Moriarty, a TV actor, appeared in a public Q & A session on Prodigy, the possibilities made him wonder if network television would go the way of vinyl records. “Television,” he told the _New York Times_, “might become the 33-1/3 of the visual arts.”

For the moment, however, the Net is Fan Central for television along with other media. David Letterman fans and those of Jay Leno debate the merits of their favorite talk show hosts, while major movie studios preview their megahits with video clips. Elvis is alive and well in an area on the Web. And just when we Netfolks are ridiculing the TV moguls’ dream of 500 channels of _Terminator_ movies, Hollywood has used our Net to ballyhoo _Junior_—a comedy starring the Terminator himself, Arnold Schwarzenegger. As if that isn’t enough, Hollywood has just released _The Net_, a thriller with some evil techies; let’s see what the marketers will post on the Web to push _that_ one. Lower on the show business hierarchy, you can find model Danielle Ash replying to questions, in alt.sex.breasts, about her double Fs.

Netfolks with more elevated tastes can dial up the WebMuseum, Paris, or check out the works of new digital artists from Boston or New York or dozens of other big cities. Obviously the Net isn’t the same as beholding a Rembrandt in Holland and gazing into the face of a local man or woman a few feet away. That’s screamingly clear. Stoll, the near Snubbite, correctly notes that “Rembrandt painted real people—their facial features and mannerisms live on today in the Dutch population. Dressed in period costumes, I’ll bet the security guard with his war medals and the young woman tour guide would look as if they stepped out of one of those incredibly detailed paintings.” Moving and true. Imagine, however, the benefits of the WebMuseum to people without the Snubbites’ ability to jet to Amsterdam or Paris. What’s more, the Web brings its own glories to compensate; I can view Artist X’s work, then call up text about the person or the times; if anything the Web can provide _more_ context than do the skimpy handouts available at most museums.

Caviling away, Stoll also objects that computers can’t reproduce the art exactly. But colors and resolution will just keep improving. The Snubbites who rant about lost details remind me of the foes of electronic books; incorrectly, given the ease of digitizing everything, the foes worry that new technology could kill off distinctive type-faces. But we shouldn’t preserve art and literature just by attending to the detail work. Culture also needs a place in the public mind; da Vinci-class art should be free, or close to it, by way of the Net. That is surely the ethos of Nicholas Pioch. An ex-Microsoft intern now studying economics in his native France, he is behind the WebMuseum, Paris, the new name it bears, now that bureaucrats won’t let him say, “Le WebLouvre.”

Within Le WebLouvre—there, I’ll say it anyway—I saw such da Vincis as _Mona Lisa_ and _Virgin and Child with the Infant John the Baptist and St. Anne_. I went on to look at Rembrandts, van Goghs, Cezannes, Dalis, Klees, and Manets, among others, and to read two warnings. “If you think the law prevents you from viewing these exhibits, you should stop now and do something more interesting, such as flying to Paris and touring live!” Pioch wrote. “Some companies may be trying to get a monopolistic grab on arts and culture,” he said elsewhere, “developing a pay-per-view logic, shipping out CD-ROMs while trying to patent stuff which belongs to each of us: a part of _our_ human civilization and history.”

How right Pioch was. Bill Gates has just bought a notebook of Leonardo da Vinci, and let’s hope that like some of the old robber barons, Gates will habitually share his acquisitions with the world. But a major difference shows up here. Andrew Carnegie and the rest did not make their money off art and entertainment, part of Gates’ master plan. For Bill Gates to give away great paintings and manuscripts will be like Carnegie giving away steel. His motives may be the most ethereal, and with a $10-billion net worth, he can afford many a donation; but a conflict will forever arise between Gates the businessman and Gates the philanthropist. Just which side will prevail when he dies? If not in life, then in death, by way of his lawyers, will he have the decency to turn _all_ his old masters loose on the Net for free viewing? No judgments here. Perhaps that day will come. He has already agreed to loan the notebook to a museum.

Old masters, of course, are far from the only Culture on the Net, and I doubt that Bill Gates will be interested in buying some of the other kind—especially Bianca’s Smut Shack. Don’t ask me if Bianca exists. The Shack’s “trolls” swear that she does. If so, maybe a good many Netfolks know her at least slightly. They can click on a picture to flit from room to room of her virtual apartment on the Web, leave notes on the walls of her virtual bathroom, enter her virtual music room to take in the latest jazz or rock, or engage virtually in sex acts with strangers in Argentina or Brazil or San Francisco or wherever else hormones fuel technology.

Bianca’s proud trolls have not sold out their mascot; the virtual Bianca lives on the Web for fun, not direct money making. But sooner or later, elsewhere on the Net, if this has not happened already, an ad agency will create a fictitious character who buys CDs, foods, books, video tapes, automobiles, and other products only from hidden “sponsors”—not open, MCI-style ones (as described in chapter 2). I’ll hope that day is far off. The FCC has had problems enough regulating children’s TV; imagine what could happen if supposedly educational areas knuckled under to Madison Avenue. I’m not sure if laws are the solution here, but it would behoove Net providers to come up _now_ with rules against that sort of thing.

In the fun areas of the Net, other dangers lurk for the vulnerable. Millions of Netfolks enjoy role-playing in imaginary worlds known as Multi-User Dungeons, where they can be knights or damsels, regardless of gender—sometimes men assume women’s roles to win more attention. At the risk of sounding like Stoll and the Snubbites, I have mixed feelings about the worth of MUD-style diversions.

A real potential exists for cocaine-heavy addiction—far more than just regular Netsurfing, where you’re not competing to rescue a fair maiden or dodge alien attacks. Stories circulate of role-players who have kissed off good grades and careers. Up in Canada, one player got so wrapped up in his game that my researcher found him amid wall-to-wall trash as he struggled to balance his schoolwork and role-playing.

Just like online groups for depressed people, however, MUDs and similar areas can bring shy Netfolks together face to face. I heard of several romances, in fact, that the games led to. Risks notwithstanding, games do more good than harm if players just know when to quit. Like it or not, among millions of Netfolks, MUDs and cousins are as much a part of the Internet as the Web and @ signs.

Of all the entertainment on the Net, however, the musical and video kinds could most intrigue the masses as the technology takes off; with just a modem, a reasonably powerful computer, and a $100 sound card, you can hear the offerings of IUMA and similar areas. You don’t even need programs such as Mosaic or Netscape if you know what you’re doing. People with cheapie dial-up connections and no frills software can download rock albums and the rest. Granted, the technology as a whole could be better, and even using IUMA can tax the wallets and patience of some. In most cases you’ll spend more time downloading the music—from a remote machine to your own—than you will hearing it. Fidelity on some setups may be just this side of a tin can. But that’s now. Wait.

Transmissions in the future will zip along through cable TV connections to the Internet, or through ISDN[3.1] phone connections. Then you’ll truly be able to use the Net as a jukebox and _hear_ what you click on with your mouse. What’s more, even now, with the right software, you can enjoy almost CD-ROM-quality fidelity from areas such as IUMA. Audio was the next step up after text, of course, and, yes, video is on the way. Techies already have mounted gigabyte after gigabyte of amateur videos on the Net. Sooner or later, directors of little films will enjoy a monster-sized IUMA-style archive. Perhaps Rob Lord and Jeff Patterson, those co-czars of IUMA, will run _it_, too.

If you think that the $10-billion-a-year recording industry is a little nervous, you’re right. In early 1994 Lord told the _San Jose Mercury News_: “We want to kill the record companies.” He and Patterson have backed off since then; they’ve even helped Warner and other giants set up Net areas of their own. IUMA’s own 500-act selection is pathetic compared to those at the largest record stores. Still, think about the long run: The IUMA model just might jeopardize the seven-digit salaries of top recording executives. After all, if the Net can advertise music and even be used to take orders—perhaps with electronic forms—just what becomes of the big studios? They themselves will sell music directly over the Net, but with heavy competition.

The bypass-the-middle-man idea could apply in other ways. What about radio hosts, for example? Suppose they can reach people all over the world through the Internet, and perhaps ultimately through wireless connections based on the Net. Will they need CBS or NBC or ABC or equivalents as much as they do now? I can already download snippets from, say, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. Too, just what will be the fate of art dealers if so much of art goes digital and people can discover artists on their own without leaving their living rooms? Publishers of newspapers, magazines, and books, of course, are in a quandary—see the next chapter on electronic publishing.

In some ways I don’t envy the big guys. IUMA is clearly wired into the Internet, while companies such as CBS, at least at this point, are fumbling in some respects. Many of the amateurs on the Net are actually coming up with better offerings than are the professionals. When I dropped by, the official Letterman page on the WWW was far from an abomination, and yet at the same time it showed the problems here.

The page indeed was full of odds and ends about how to get _Late Show_ tickets, Letterman’s upcoming guests, his top-ten lists (the one for the April 13th broadcast was on “Ways CBS Can Raise Money,” with number one being “A two-hour paycheck freeze on Letterman”), and the rest. But where were the connections with the rest of the Net, especially the many Letterman fans out there? How about the fans’ Letterman pages? Or relevant mailing lists or newsgroups? Perhaps they were there but hidden, but whatever the case the cyberspace Letterman was less hip than the one on The Box.

To Letterman’s credit, he didn’t fake things. He publicly confessed he was ignorant of data ways. But in my opinion, his Web people could have done better.

Moving on to the CBS home page, I saw an offer for me to “Join the EYE ON THE NET club. That way we can send you more information about CBS and its programs. You can also take part in special previews and other interactive events. Fill out the following registration form and we’ll give you a special CBS screen saver just for joining.” Oh, boy, that was just why I was on the Internet—to end up on marketers’ lists. I didn’t blame CBS for trying; some of Letterman’s fans would like the free software. But surely the network could have done better.

Aaron Barnhart, who put out a good little electronic fan newsletter called _Late Show News_, defended Dave’s people on the Net. “I think it’s great,” he said of the official Letterman area. “All of these large entities are trying their best to integrate with the interactive age. A lot of e-mail gets passed that you never see, so don’t assume that just because there aren’t any bulletin boards ... there is no interaction happening.”

Perhaps he was being kind to his sources for his newsletter—I hadn’t any idea. What was clear was that he’d made a second career of Lettermandom. He devoted twenty to thirty hours a week to Letterman-related activities. Much of his newsletter was a review of reviews (“Frank Rich of the _New York Times_ wrote one of his standard pitiless columns last week on the Oscars broadcast, and we quote, ‘in which the belly-flopping David Letterman demonstrated just how large a bullet he dodged by not moving his own show to L.A.’”). Barnhart also served as owner of the Top 10 List (“60,000 subscribers and booming”).

So what was Barnhart in it for? He was freelancing for the _Village Voice_, and I could see where some attention might do any writer’s career good, but if Barnhart even wanted to be on _The Late Show_ itself, he did a pretty good job of concealing that. “Attention is great,” he said, “but it doesn’t pay the rent.” Did he send stuff into the show? “No.” So why was Letterman so popular on the Net? “Demographics.” Well-off computer owners just liked that kind of program.

I checked out the Letterman page maintained by Jason A. Lindquist, an electronic engineering student at the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana, a self-described “Statistician, Smart-Ass-for-Hire, and Mac Programmer.” I found references to newsgroup postings on such items as “Dave instigates the feud with Bryant Gumbel with these words,” “The great Stevie Nicks controversy of 1986,” “Madonna—Your first choice to date your son,” and “No inside stuff on the strong guy or the fat guy here.” And I saw mentions of the newsletter, the Frequently Asked Questions List, and at least two Letterman-related newsgroups. CBS ought to hire this guy.

It was time to move on to alt.fans.letterman. I did a search within Netscape for the word “Leno” in the subject header and found a post from an apparent Leno fan on the attack: “Everyone knows that Jay Leno is way better than ugly gap-tooth Dave!”

“Oh,” replied one of the faithful, “you say that Jay Leno is still on the air? Is it true that they use a wide-angle lens to photograph that lantern jaw of his? Just wondering.”

“Letterman has more comedy in his little pinkie toe than Leno will have in his wildest dreams,” said another Davite, “and if Letterman is so ugly, who has all the models and top actresses flirting with him and asking him to go out—it certainly isn’t Leno.”

_That_, not the official Letterman area, was the true Net. Just what might await the world if the inmates actually ran the asylum and themselves mounted a major entertainment effort rather than trusting the corporate world. It had happened with the Internet Underground Music Archives, and I liked the results.

IUMA

The normal story is that IUMA began when Rob Lord and Jeff Patterson, the co-czars, met in a newsgroup devoted to supermodels. Both liked Kate Moss, a waify Calvin Klein woman; strutting down the runways, she was lost amid the big, bosomy knockouts favored by so many young men on the Net. It turned out that Lord and Patterson were both from Valencia, California, a far-north suburb of Los Angeles. They knew each other slightly from William Hart High School, both had worked in record stores while teenagers, and both had both been attending the University of California at Santa Cruz. That’s the story, and it’s true.

IUMA, however, in another way, may have started not on the Net but in the corporeal United Kingdom.

Thousand and thousands of Brits were dancing to synthesized _bleeps_, _conks_, _cooonkks_, _clunks_, _bomb-bombs_ and _tssss-tsss-tssses_, and odds and ends that I could never even come close to reproducing here. The name of the music was Rave, as in “raving mad,” and by the time Lord was in high school in the 1980s, the craze had found its way to Los Angeles.

Middle-class white suburbanites, Latinos, Blacks, they were all _bleep_ing and _conk_ing together, thousands of them, risking the wrath of the fire department, overcrowding the halls, going at it from 11 P.M. on, some dancing twelve hours on into the morning.

“No place in Los Angeles,” Lord said of the Rave halls, “had such a peaceful coexistence as between these three groups. They didn’t say anything. They shared the beats and feelings and the technology. And on the Rave scene, the person in charge is the DJ, and they’re sort of the cultural funnel. The DJs were in charge of finding these odd records that would come from Belgium and from the UK and from Chicago, and there were some made-in-Los Angeles things. They were hard to find, but the DJs were responsible for scouting them out and bringing the very latest _bleeps_ and _conks_ together.”

“So,” I asked, thinking of IUMA and Lord’s chance to bring the world to his listeners, “you liken yourself to those DJs?”

“Yeah, yeah!” Lord said enthusiastically. “I believe IUMA is my personal implementation of Rave’s calling. I just love working with technology and all those kinds of things, and what Rave culture espoused was that there’s a new revolution going on, an information revolution. You know, one of the biggest stars of Rave music was a band called Dee-Lite. And one of the first lines was, ‘From New York City in the age of communication.’ And that means all kinds of communications, a shrinking world, Internet, it means ideas and the convergence of ideas.”

Returning to the subject of his younger days, Rob Lord told me how much he hated the Depeche Mode music that was so popular in upper-middle-class neighborhoods like his—the kind the record stores were selling. He wanted his music from the clubs, from the 100-copy pressing, not from the megaconglomerates offering the likes of Depeche. “The lyrics were terrible, and the emotions were feigned.” I’m sure Depeche fans might disagree. The point, however, was that Depeche music was much more readily available at record stores than Rave was, and Rob grew unhappy with the distribution system.

Jeff Patterson, working at a music store, just like Rob Lord, was equally disgusted. Patterson and co-workers “would sit there and talk about who’s making all the money.” CDs cost $15-$17 at Music Plus, his employer. Elsewhere they were around $12-$13. “And you know, we were thinking like, ‘Where is that extra $4 being pocketed?’ You know, after all the costs were taken out, then their manager would get paid, the record company would get paid, people on the tour would get paid, and then the band would finally get some money after all that, and it was usually a very small check. So the artists that were actually continuing to be artists were the artists that were making money; so it was, like, this level of superstardom that was consistent and the barriers of entry were extremely high.”

That was true in all kinds of creative endeavors, especially in writing. I myself was amused when lobbyists representing industries such as music and publishing would rant on and on about the need for “creative incentives.” If business people at the megaconglomerates really understood incentives, they would cut out their caviar, sell off the executive jets, and spend more than a modicum on garden-variety artists—not just the Mailers and Madonnas. When, even as a teenager, Jeff Patterson started asking where the money was going, he was laying some of the more important underpinnings for IUMA.

An “A” student who would later graduate near the top of his class, Patterson wrote a school paper on another major issue: censorship. Back in the 1980s, Tipper Gore, Al’s wife, had helped start a group called the Parents Music Resource Center, which wanted to rate music and keep the more nefarious offerings out of the hands and CD players of young people. “I was a big fan of Frank Zappa and he was basically taking it upon himself to challenge the PMRC.” The Senate held hearings. And Patterson recalled that PMRC deemed a Zappa recording, “Jazz from Hell,” to be sinful. The album lacked lyrics and the cover just showed Zappa’s face. “It was obvious,” Patterson said of Tipper’s group, “that they weren’t actually listening to the content or caring what it was. They just kind of labeled some artists as being bad, and therefore were trying to prevent stores from selling many albums.” I asked if that made Patterson think later on, “Let’s go on the Net so we don’t have those bozos to worry about.” “Yeah, yeah. That actually had a big part in it.”

From the start, it was clear that Patterson’s own music wouldn’t exactly please the conventional. In high school he played guitar in speed metal bands, which are “usually a lot faster, a lot more angry sounding” than heavy metal. When the Ugly Mugs found each other at William Hart High, Patterson rejoiced in his friends’ weirdness. The style in this case was Dada, a form of random art.

“Who cared if anyone liked listening to it,” Patterson said. “We just wanted to play it. We were using mainly guitar and keyboards and bass. However, we wouldn’t always play them in the normal standard ways. Like, we’d use guitar for percussion or something, and we had also used a vacuum cleaner and things like that. A lot of times we just recorded sounds of things that were just laying around.” Their big gig was at an interpretative dancing class at a community college where teacher and students loved Dada-style mime.

The Ugly Mugs was a life, not just a band. Except for an Egyptian guitarist, whose hair stubbornly kept turning into an Afro when he let it grow, all the Mugs sported long locks. In a dark, ratty, poster-ridden room, they would talk politics and philosophy, standard teenage fashion.

Lord ended up at the University of California at Santa Cruz, and Patterson himself went on to the University of California at Berkeley, where he studied computers, his fallback field. He had made music on them in high school, and, in fact, at Berkeley. “I started changing my major to be a combination of music and computers. Two years into it I really got frustrated with the high pressure and decided to transfer to U.C. Santa Cruz. It’s right on the beach, a laid-back community. Everyone drives, like, five miles under the speed limit.” Beyond that, members of the Ugly Mugs had moved there, and in Patterson’s opinion, the school itself was “really great.”

David Huffman taught there. In a certain niche of computerdom, Huffman was famous as the creator of Huffman coding, a compression routine that software products such as Stacker use to double the space available on hard drives. Music isn’t exactly a low-bandwidth use of the Net. Compression routines of one kind or another are de rigueur for the transmission of high-quality sound—not just because of the space that the material requires, but also because big files take longer to transmit.

At the time Patterson moved to Santa Cruz, he wasn’t using Hoffman compression on the Net or posting CD-quality sound from hundreds of musicians through an IUMA-style operation. But like other techies, he was posting files in the synthesized MIDI format. “The stuff I put up there, it sounded like a bad Casio keyboard playing our songs. It really wasn’t very representative at all. I’d just sit there at my computer, compose ’em on the computer, and upload ’em on the Net. I posted them to a couple of news groups, like alt.binaries.sound and things like that and basically got no response at all.”

Jeff Patterson was reading the supermodel newsgroup when he saw a posting from Rob Lord in favor of Kate Moss, the model that so many of the regulars considered too bony. Patterson replied. “We were both huge Kate Moss fans.” Lord sent him some e-mail talking about how Kate Moss should be the “queen of supermodels.” People on the Net have a custom of leaving “signatures” at the bottom of messages—places where they may post their address or phone number, or an I-don’t-speak-for-IBM disclaimer, or quote somebody to support them or deride them—and Patterson took quick notice of Lord’s “.sig.” It alluded to “MPEG Audio Compression, 16 to 1 CD Quality.”

“And,” Patterson recalled, “I was like, ‘Wow, what’s that?’ So I e-mailed him back talking about getting together some Moss pictures, and in passing I asked him about MPEG compression.” MPEG stood for Motion Picture Expert Group—engineers who set standards for audio and video compression. Growing curious, Patterson downloaded software so he could play MPEG through his sound card. The results delighted him, and he spread the news to the other Ugly Mugs. Hey, guys, Patterson said in effect, what if we put our music on the Internet? “They thought it was a pretty good idea. So we decided to chip in together and go ahead and buy the software that we needed to compress MPEG files, because you could get that player for free, but the compressor cost $100. Rob came over to my house, and I told him we were putting our band on the Net, and he was all excited about the whole idea of creating this archive of bands on the Net.“ But of course! Rave-think could reach cyberspace.

Something was evident here, something obvious to me, but perhaps not to all the bluenoses and prudish, power-fixated bureaucrats. Patterson and Lord were proving the old wisdom that hormones could drive technology on the Net, or at least the applied variety.

The wizardry of MPEG would be useless if people didn’t use it. And it took a meeting of Patterson and Lord in the supermodel group—not one devoted to Bible study, or to paeans to Bill Clinton or Al Gore, or to the mandarins of Singapore—for IUMA to give MPEG one of its biggest boosts on the Net. Why, horror of horrors, Patterson and Lord just may have wanted to scan and swap _copyrighted_ photos of Kate Moss. One way or another MPEG would become important on the Net, but thanks to people like these two, it was happening far faster than it would have otherwise. Technology was at odds with the vested interests of record companies, and they knew it.

At around the same time IUMA was getting under way in fall 1993, lobbyists for the companies and performing artists were fighting for laws that could lead to onerous pay-per-listen schemes—while publishers were trying to lay the basis for pay-per-read. Indeed, business people and creators should receive fair compensation, especially the creators; but in the zeal to protect major political contributors from the entertainment industry, bureaucrats and lawyers could imperil technology in the most lethal of ways. Bruce Lehman, Bill Clinton’s intellectual property czar, would prove it later with a stunningly oppressive proposal called the Green Paper, a technophobic lawyer’s wetdream, a techie’s nightmare.

The first song the Ugly Mugs put on the Net was called ”_Arbeit Macht Frei_”—German for “Work will make you free.” A punky carnival song, it sparked an instant debate on free speech.

Asked about the title, Patterson told me, “It was kind of born out of our frustration of, ‘In order to have the money to do everything that we want to do, we have to work, but if we work, we can’t do anything we want to do.’ So it was kind of like commenting on people’s attitude of, ‘If you work you’ll be able to do what you want to do,’ when actually you won’t be able to do what you want to, because you’ll be working. Actually it wasn’t a smart song title. It was a phrase that was over the gate on the way to the Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland. Unfortunately, people took it to be this Nazi song, which is actually completely the opposite of what we meant.

“We got responses from people who flamed me because they thought it was extremely cruel to be using this as a name for a song and taking it all lighthearted when it actually meant something serious to a lot of people. Whenever anyone actually wrote to me, I usually sent them back the lyrics and explained our stance, why it was called that. It definitely created enough of a stir among the few people who heard it. You wonder if a label would ever take a chance with something like that.”

On the Net, however, “_Arbeit Macht Frei_” would find its audience. A man from Turkey asked for a full demo tape—unavailable—and more songs. Other Netfolks wrote in from Texas, Florida, and elsewhere in the States, some of whom said more or less: “You know, wow, I’m a Zappa fan and I can hear the influence. It’s pretty cool.” The Net, in character, was blurring distinctions between artists and fans and helping the two groups mix. “We realized we had something,” Patterson told me. “Like, ‘Jeez, we got these responses to a band that had never played anywhere and didn’t have a tape out.’ So we started grabbing a couple of our friends’ bands—like my roommate’s. And we put Rob’s roommate’s band up there, and we just kind of kept grabbing bands to put up. And slowly everyone was getting one or two responses to what they had posted. And we needed a place to actually keep all this music. There were like four bands maybe at that time.”

Patterson, however, quickly filled up all the disk space available to him at his commercial Internet provider, Netcom; so he and Lord contacted their university and asked if they could store the music there. “Well, it turned out that the guy who was in charge of running the FTP site was a musician—he was in four bands—and he said, ‘Sure, go for it.’ And we put his four bands up there.”

The technology would have seemed infuriatingly hard to the world at large. You couldn’t just hook into the World Wide Web, point and click your way to the IUMA archives, and choose the song you wanted; no, you had to do FTP, short for File Transfer Protocol, threading your way through the big hard drives at Santa Cruz, until you reached the subdirectory with the music. And then, with most software, you had to type out the file names. Patterson and Lord didn’t even start out with postings on Gopher (which, to be grossly simplistic, is a more primitive version of the Web).

Even back then, however, the two were thinking about the Net equivalent of album covers or of the J cards that record companies used to tout cassettes. In other words they didn’t just post files of sound alone. They also pondered the use of files with pictures that music fans could download.

“At this point,” Patterson said, “it was still just a fun project. We didn’t think about making it a money-making venture at that point. We were just like, you know, ‘Let’s put bands up and see what we can do to mess with the record industry.’ We had this attitude like, ‘We’ll cut out waste in the industry.’ At that time there was, like, no press about us, so we weren’t really vocal, but we had those attitudes. We were kind of like naive and rebellious.”

Then an event happened that was almost as significant to IUMA as was the discovery of MPEG. Lord discovered the World Wide Web. “None of us,” Patterson recalled, “had any clue what it was. I think it was in December of ’93 that we got a hold of a copy of Mosaic.” They tried it out in a faculty lounge at U.C. Santa Cruz. “There wasn’t really much content on the Web at all. It was pretty much, like, weather satellites. We realized from that point on that we could really do something with taking the music and the pictures and using the World Wide Web as the way to present everything. People would be able to look at the album cover, read the text, see ‘play’ buttons. You know, press the play button, hear the music, and all that sort of thing.

“So,” Patterson said, “we called up the guy we knew from maintaining the FTP archives at U.C. Santa Cruz, and asked him what he knew about the World Wide Web.” Overnight he learned how to set IUMA up on the Web. His name was Jon Luini, and he would become a partner in IUMA, the co-czars’ “Kaiser.”

Meanwhile IUMA’s popularity kept growing, and soon the archives landed on SunSite UNC, a big digital library sponsored by Sun Micro Systems at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. IUMA would even make it to servers in Europe, so that people there could enjoy the music without tying up the trans-Atlantic connections. Other big companies, such as Silicon Graphics, took an interest in IUMA and donated computers and other gear.

But how were Patterson and Lord—and their musicians—going to make money off the Internet, where “free” was a religion and where commercial audio might be pirated? I loved the many legitimately free pleasures of the Net. It was truly for sharing. IUMA, of course, was offering lots of music at no charge. Via the World Wide Web, I myself was giving away a book chapter I’d written for a forthcoming information science collection; and I hoped that at least some material from _NetWorld!_ would be retrievable without any money changing hands. But what to do about the darker side of “free?”

Sympathetic to the cash-short but clearly a realist, Lord told how casually kids copied computer games for each other. “There’s a complete underground going on,” he said, and he told how young hackers had secretly turned the IUMA archives into a site for stolen software. The mischief was hard to spot just by doing the usual check of the storage area.

“We deleted their stuff,” Lord recalled, “and left a note saying, ‘Leave us alone, you Rug Rats,’ because it was clear there were 13-year-olds doing it. Some of the biggest pirates in the world are younger than 15.”

His words rang true. Adolescents in the States were no match for the best pros abroad, but the teenaged pirates could still be awesomely well organized. One group of teens might crack the software. Another group might craft a slick screen telling who had defeated the protection. Lord told of a 13-year-old making $24,000 a year writing and selling shareware; and although the business was legitimate, this example showed the energy and brains out there among the young—in other words, the difficulty of fighting rip-offs.

Lord and Patterson were thinking about releasing IUMA offerings with digital identifiers that would make it easier to track down thieves. And yet another tack could be to design the music files that you could play only with the right digital keys. IUMA’s owners were of GenNet; they were more interested in relying on technology than law to thwart pirates.

Piracy is one reason why major record companies feel uneasy about the Internet. Unable to ignore so large a market, they want help in getting their message across to the strange, young denizens. Warner paid IUMA to put short samples of music online, along with pictures and information about the artists. It was similar to what Patterson and Lord were doing already.

Now, however, like many others, the two were looking ahead to new business models. Lord had a bunch of possibilities in mind.

One was that people would pay if they liked what they heard, and maybe even give in advance. Another was that they would receive little gifts——maybe clay cats?——for making donations.

Patterson, however, offered some models that were more conventional. Gasp, his comments even sounded like an actual business plan.

First, he said, he and Lord would take orders for CDs and tapes online for companies such as Tower Records. Then IUMA would go the next step. It would sell files of music electronically. Fans would be able to use Web browsers like Netscape to encrypt credit card numbers so hackers couldn’t intercept them. Eventually IUMA would sell music for instant listening without customers first having to transfer it to their hard disks. “There could be some kind of royalty treatment,” Patterson said. “You might pay two cents every time you listened to a song. Or you could just buy an album.” Some good possibilities existed here as long as no one gouged. If people could hear music with just a tiny investment up front, that might benefit new performers.

More immediately, IUMA was helping fledgling musicians and others by way of an informal support network. Sue Few, a Santa Cruz woman who’d formerly worked for record companies, went online with a newsletter called _Sound Check_ and offered a stream of tips on subjects such as copyright law, musicians’ unions, royalties, and lining up bookings. “Booking people aren’t so bad, are they?” she wrote. “If they enjoy your tape and feel you’ll fit well with their customers, you’ll get booked—simple as that. So they don’t return your telephone calls—keep calling until you talk to a live person and still keep calling until you get an answer and a date from them.”

IUMA itself was a calling card of sorts. Record companies and clubs could cruise the archives looking for bands to sign up.

Most important of all, however, IUMA helped potential fans and musicians get together. At the time I toured the IUMA area you could check out offerings by “Last 15 Bands” just uploaded to the archives, by artist, by label, by location, and by song title. Or you could click on a database with a number of options. I myself wanted to know more about Scott Brookman, who had written “When I Die You Can’t Have My Organs,” and who, as a result of IUMA, had been on National Public Radio.

A digitized photo showed him to be a bearded man with glasses. Something white was against his face, though I couldn’t quite discern the shape. I hoped it wasn’t a stray from an anatomy lab.

Messages on the screen said IUMA would let Netfolks listen to Brookman’s “Organs” in stereo or mono. I clicked on the latter option and watched the bottom of my screen as it showed the number of bytes passing over the wires from a computer in California to my 486DX-class machine. Within 45 seconds I’d received a 119K file. In size it was equivalent to maybe 60 double-spaced, typewritten pages even though this was music not text.

“When I die,” the lyrics wafted out of my stereo hooked to the 486, “you can’t have my organs, though you think that you will need them ...” If I’d had the right software on my machine, I could have heard several minutes’ worth. The song was good even if, with my primitive sound software, it wasn’t even AM in audio quality. My rather untrained ears picked up a Loudon Wainwright-ish edge to the music. I made a mental note to myself. When I was off my book deadline, I’d do what I should have done in the first place and install the MPEG software whose existence had helped make IUMA possible. I had heard only a little cut in another format With MPEG I could have enjoyed three minutes’ worth, and in better fidelity.

In the IUMA area Brookman said, “Organs” was “from my latest cassette release, ‘They’ll Nickel and Dime You to Death.’” He thought of his music “as a bizarre mix of stylistic parody, satire, self-referential, and meta-songs, full of clever guitar riffs and daring vocal harmonies. I write about personal heroes, local history, teenage memories, bits of folklore, and sometimes I make fun of rock music (lovingly, of course). Usually the result is intentionally funny ...”

Brookman’s inevitable pitch for money was reasonable enough. “I hope you enjoy the song, and I really think you should get yourself a copy of ‘They’ll Nickel and Dime You to Death.’ Send a check for five bucks (no charge cards) made payable to Loser Records. That’s a full 60 minutes of awesome music for only $5. Where else, other than a used record store, can you find that kind of entertainment bargain? Here’s our address: Loser Records, P.O. Box 14719, Richmond, Virginia 23221.” Hey, I’d already enjoyed a bargain, his delightful little fan area. I would remember the name Brookman.

People could leave feedback and I brought up some. “My colleagues and I agree—what a scream!!” read a note from Virginia, where Brookman lived. “I think we’re going to track down your CD. Congrats on a nifty tune! It’s good to hear a local band ‘make it big.’” An Australian wrote in: “Heheheheh. Nice sense of humour.” None other than Jon Luini, Raiser of IUMA, said of “Organs”: “I cannot get this song out of my head! The sincerity around this song is a great combination with the odd nature of the lyrics, especially when combined with the folk feel of the music. It makes me feel like it should be included whenever people first get their driver’s license.”

Brookman’s electronic mail address was online, of course, together with those of listeners who had offered feedback. Anyone wanting to start a fan list focused on him would already have some names and e-mail addresses handy.

This was what the Net was so good for—not displaying Canteresque spam on behalf of Green Cards or pitches from CBS to join its fan club.

Small business actually enjoyed an advantage here. To CBS, fan mail must have been a nice a way of gauging the market. But the Brookmans of this world could go far beyond that and establish good rapport with fans, one by one—something for which the people at the CBS site would never have had time, given its volume. Small worked in other ways for Brookman. He or Loser Records (were they the same?) could do a short run of CDs and spread the news with minimum investment. Pressing a thousand CDs costs less than $2,000 nowadays. Combine that with the Net, and the music world just might be a little kinder to a young performer than it was in the days when Lord and Patterson were toiling away in the record stores back in Valencia.

Granted, a place in the IUMA archives was hardly a guarantee of success. A musician with the band Black Watch told me that she and her colleagues normally heard only from a fan or so a week. IUMA would _not_ make a band instantly rich. On the other hand, she loved the feedback and encouragement that arrived from all over the world; and, we both thought, wasn’t that important, too—not just the money? The music was finding its way to those who loved it. Besides, in the end, all the small fry might add up. Lord said that instead of one Madonna there might be fifty—“Maybe it will no longer make sense to have even one.”[3.2] Perhaps, I hoped, the money instead would reach the Black Watches.

Once Lord had predicted that in several years IUMA might be “a one- or two-digit percentage of the $9 billion music industry.”[3.3] I didn’t know what would happen. Major record companies would surely be doing plenty on their own. And when I talked to Lord in April 1995, IUMA’s annual revenues were still in the low six figures. But that could change, quickly. No matter what happened, IUMA was brilliant for a niched world in which millions were rebelling against the any-color-if-it’s-black mindset.

We want just the right friends and spouse; the right home; the right coffee; the right newsgroups, now that they existed for all; and, yes, just the right music.

* * * * *

The same nichization is happening in the world of publishing—the Internet is home to hundreds if not thousands of electronic publications. So what’s a hometown paper to do? Just how is _Time_ magazine responding? And in such strange times—normal times, actually, once they’ve been around long enough—what becomes of books, especially when you consider the digital piracy issue. In the next chapter I’ll lay out the problems and even suggest a few solutions.

CHAPTER FOUR

Pulped Wood versus Electrons: Can the Print World Learn to Love the Net?

I ran across A. C. Snow on the Internet the other day, and old memories poured forth.[4.1] A.C. is as low tech as they come. He writes a Tar Heelish column with jokes and stories about church picnics and football and beach trips, and yet there he was online with the folksy prose that I remembered from eons ago. The _Raleigh Times_ is gone now. A.C. works instead for the bigger _News & Observer_, a sister newspaper that thudded against my dormitory door when I was in college. Weekday circulation is around 150,000 nowadays, and many state legislators wake up each morning to the _N & O_—it just might be the most powerful paper in North Carolina.

Millions of people on the Net, however, would question the need for the three-story tan brick building, the fleet of delivery trucks, and the recent decision to invest $36 million in color presses.

You can’t update the ink on pulped trees the way you can move around dots on a computer screen. “Aren’t newspapers obsolete?” scads of techies are asking. Besides, the Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill area has changed. Thousands of locals swap e-mail addresses at cocktail parties, while many schoolchildren grow up reading off computer screens as well as from books. IBM and other Fortune 500 companies are in Research Triangle Park outside town.

Still, like the Raleigh area, the _N & O_ has evolved. In a nearby building, a small crew is putting out electronic newspapers on the Internet and on a bulletin board system. This isn’t just a pulp-and-ink-era newspaper company. It’s also an Internet provider. Aided by two phone companies, the _N & O_ gives out free Internet service to teachers and students to find out what the latter would like online in the future. It’s offered Netfolks a colorful, multimedia tour of the state. Tens of thousands drop by the _N & O_ area each week. “The Internet is like the real world—unorganized, unruly, and filled with more happenings than any one person can possibly track,” says Frank Daniels III, the paper’s executive editor. “It’s growing at a fantastic speed, and its citizens are literate. An opportunity for editors!”[4.2]

Not everyone on the print side feels as he does. When a _Washington Post_ writer did a gossipy little item on Cliff Stoll’s net.exposé, the journalist said book editors were looking forward to reviewing _Silicon Snake Oil_ as “confirmation of what they hoped was true all along.”[4.3] That may or may not have been a joke. Whatever the case, a war is going on between pulped wood and electrons. Can commercial publications, from newspapers to book publishers, learn to love the Internet, and what does this mean to us readers?

“There is no doubt in my mind that the Net will force a transformation of newspapers,” says Peter Lewis, a cyberspace writer for the _New York Times_, “but demise? That’s what they said about radio and television as well.”[4.4] Just the same, a headline in _Wired_ magazine said online newspapers “still suck.” Many newspapers are too enamored with the traditional models where editors and writers inflict whatever they want on the unsuspecting public. They don’t give their readers enough of a chance to speak back online or communicate with each other. Still, the best electronic publications can indeed be two way. And more and more of them will be packaged for the medium. You’ll be able to read summaries of stories, for example, and then summon up longer versions with a click of the mouse.

Even ads may improve. “Think of the typical print tire ad,” says Teresa Martin, an online expert with the Knight-Ridder newspaper chain. “_Yawn._ But what if touching each tire bought up detailed specs about it, or the sizes in which the store currently has it in stock—or even some really cool car careening around a racetrack with the voice-over ‘speed rated?’ The ad can be like a window to a store, enticing the reader in to look for information.”

I know—computers are too hard for many technophobes to learn, too big to use in bed, and often too blurry or flickery to read off of; and batteries are forever eager for their next charge. But life will get better. It will happen faster if governments worry less about smartening up TV sets and more about smartening up schoolchildren with programs that drive down the cost of book-friendly computers. Much, however, is already going on. Xerox, for example, has experimented with a computer screen whose output is as sharp as printing on paper. It’s a power hog, but less hungry screens are coming. Writing in _Digital Media_, Martin says the right hardware could be a mere six years away.[4.5] I myself think—based on my monitoring of technical publications—that her estimate is conservative.

Besides, even now, electronic texts can at least complement the paper kind. For example, they can increase the variety of newspapers, books, and magazines available. After U.S. Senator Jesse Helms joked that Bill Clinton would need a bodyguard to protect him from angry service people who resented his military policies, I did not rely just on the _Washington Post_ for details. I called up the story directly from the _News & Observer_ hundreds of miles away. What’s more, it’s easy to wander from one electronic publication to others when you are after facts on the same topic, or to search back issues of newspapers and magazines. Even novelists are discovering the possibilities of the new media. Readers can choose their own endings or pass on suggestions to the authors of works in progress.

Adventurous media people are trying to adapt to this online world as gracefully as they can, and the Internet is oh so enticing to many. The cost of the technology has fallen to the point where a bare-bones newspaper can go on the World Wide Web by investing as little as $5,000-$10,000 up front. Publishers needn’t divvy up revenue with a commercial online service, such as America Online or CompuServe.

Compared to pulped wood, the Net looks better and better—the price of paper shot up some 30 percent between the fall of 1994 and the spring of 1995. Environmental regulators are forcing the pulp mills to quit sullying the air and the water, and new mills can cost half a billion dollars each to build. “Like the rest of us,” writes Jonathan Seybold, publisher of _Digital Media_, “the paper company executives read all of the press stuff about the Information Highway, the rise of online services, and the decline of paper-based publishing.” And he says they are now asking, “Why should we invest in a new paper mill?” The result? Newsprint shortages and higher prices. “The fear,” Seybold says, “creates its own reality.”[4.6]

More than 100 newspapers either are on the Internet or are planning to be there. The _New York Times_, for example, has used the World Wide Web to transmit a fax edition condensed from the normal paper. A full-grown _Times_ may be on the Net now. The _San Jose Mercury News_ in California not only is online, it offers a service called News Hound. For just $10 a month, the Hound will automatically scan a massive database from Knight-Ridder papers and additional dailies, then e-mail you the latest articles on the cover girls of _Sports Illustrated_, on Afghanistan, on the Chicago Bears, on Bill Clinton, or on any other topic that quickens your pulse or makes you reach for your Valium. From the _Halifax Daily News_ to Poland’s _Gazeta Wyborcza_, newspapers are trying the Net. Even a strike paper, published by reporters of the San Francisco _Examiner_ and _Chronicle_, made it into cyberspace.

Some Netfolks preferred the strike daily to the electronic spin-offs of the regular ones, and I wasn’t surprised. What applies to business applies to newspapers: The Net is a great equalizer in some ways; a small newspaper can reach as far-flung a readership as an international daily. In fact, the first paper on the World Wide Web just might have been the _Palo Alto Weekly_ from Silicon Valley. South Africa’s _Mail & Guardian_, a 30,000-circulation weekly, finds the Internet a much cheaper way to reach people overseas than air-mail. Devoted to Russian news, the _St. Petersburg Press_ uses the Internet to serve an English-speaking audience throughout the world. The _London Telegraph_ has shown up on the Net with some striking graphics. No longer is the Internet just for little magazines published by techies and smart young English majors.

Time Warner has put _Time_, _People_, _Entertainment Weekly_, and a shelf full of other magazines in a colorful, well-done area of the World Wide Web. Readers can praise and flame the editors and each other. Hearst magazines have their own area. _PC Magazine_, one of the giants of the Ziff-Davis chain, enraged many Netfolks with clueless articles suggesting a rather thorough ignorance of the Internet and its reasons for existence. But guess what. Now Ziff-Davis has a wonderful Web area with generous samples from its magazines, including _PC_. The German newsmagazine _Der Spiegel_ is on the World Wide Web, too, complete with some news in English; from Japan, specialized publications serve Net audiences ranging from gays to office workers.

I learned of the most dramatic use of cyberspace by a magazine just as I was finishing this book. _Omni_, the popular science publication, said it would forsake monthly paper editions in favor of a version on America Online, augmented by just four print editions, one each quarter. It expected to save some $4 million a year. The newsletter _Interactive Week Publishing Alert_ raised some valid questions—copies of back articles from _Omni_ were too hard to locate—but even if the grand experiment failed, the model was out there. A major publication was more or less forsaking pulped wood in favor of computer networks.

Book publishers are catching up with newspapers and magazines. Time Warner, Random House, Macmillan, and McGraw-Hill use the Internet for promotion, and they will distribute more and more of their books this way. Free classics like _A Tale of Two Cities_ have been a staple of the Net for years, thanks to voluntary efforts such as Project Gutenberg. And now you can pay a few dollars to download a short story by Stephen King or works by many others.

Meanwhile, however, some old-fogey publishers view the Internet as an unfathomable virus transmitted via cable. That’s especially true of the book business. People in it fear a massive bootlegging of their wares. Using the Net, you can even pirate paper books; there is no technical reason why machines cannot scan the latest from Philip Roth or Tom Clancy, convert their novels to bits and bytes, and zap them to your friends in Juneau. Software-based copy protection could help safeguard electronic books. But I myself think there are other solutions as well—for example, a national library fund to make free or low-cost books practical and reduce the incentive for bootlegging.

Paper publishers also complain that if electronic books are cheaper to create and distribute, manuscripts will receive less editing. With a good library system in effect, however, a way would exist to highlight works of merit—marketers would enjoy less clout and we’d see fewer best-sellers on astrology and more on history. And without the distribution costs, more money could go to writers and editors.

Other obstacles also exist in the minds of publishers eyeing the Internet. Some worry about finding a market for text offered through a global network. And certain people in the book industry also dread the competition from the many gigabytes of free material that the Internet offers. Didn’t Samuel Johnson know best?—No one but a blockhead ever wrote except for money. If nothing else, many word people are captives of their senses. They hate reading off computer screens; they want to hear a newspaper thunk against their doors, hold Section A in their hands, hear it rattle, sniff the ink.

Going in the other direction, many people on the Internet love to bash the print world as benighted and even a little worthless. Who needs publishers when you can post your own books and little magazines for the world to read on the Net? That’s simplistic in many cases; I’ve got a little more faith in the editors at Knopf or Viking than I do in the proofreading gang from the Department of Chemistry or Joe’s Literary Bar.

People on the Net, however, are right to criticize the print media’s ignorance of electronic publishing and computer networks. If nothing else, many traditional publishers fail to grasp the potential here. Looking at the old, underpowered machines that clutter their offices, they may believe that computers won’t progress from there. An intelligent staffer with a publishers group—someone I respected on other matters—didn’t understand the promise of computers for reading e-books. I shared this story with Robin Peek of Simmons College, who coedited a book on electronic publishing for the American Society for Information Science and the M.I.T. Press. She told me that many book publishers just hoped that computers wouldn’t improve until the publishers died or retired. Computers keep stubbornly getting better, though; blurry screens and fragile hard disks won’t always be the order of day.

More amazingly, a popular magazine misinformed some of us Netfolks that we were “netgods.” Didn’t our Internet addresses end with a prestigious “.net” rather than “.com” (the designation for a commercial site) or “.edu” (for a school site)? Strange. Anyone can pay $14 a month to ClarkNet or many other services and automatically get an address like [email protected]. So much for my godliness.

Zeuslike, however, I’ll hurl thunderbolts at HarperCollins and Doubleday. The former published the book that the immigration lawyers in Arizona used to justify the off-topic ads that they had inflicted on thousands of newsgroups. The Canter and Siegel guide was in the same class as astrology books. It talked about spending just $.0333 per thousand users per month to reach 30 million people on the Net. Most of the people, however, can only use e-mail and aren’t on Usenet or the Web. Doubleday erred in other ways. It let Cliff Stoll smear cyberspace as “devoid of warmth and human kindness.” Devoid? A rather all-encompassing word. In both cases the paper publishers were entering an unknown world.

To give another example, a _New Yorker_ article lamented the destruction of library catalogues without really telling how electronic libraries could do the job better. The article went on about the handwritten annotations on the cards, and I could see the point here. Couldn’t a card for a Civil War book include an informal recommendation for a book on Antietam or Gettysburg? Must all cross-references be official? So I could appreciate writer Nicholson Baker’s worry about the fate of those beautiful wooden cabinets. What he played down, however, is that technology can let electronic librarians create quick paths from one work to another.[4.7]

Far from being exotic nowadays, this technology is the essence of the World Wide Web. So if you looked up a general item on the Civil War, you might see some annotated references to an item on Antietam, and go there instantly with a click of the mouse.

Just as wrongly, an article in the _Atlantic Monthly_ of September 1994 said future electronic books could perish because they used many disk formats. “The End of the Book?” asked the headline over T. J. Max’s doomsaying. But CD-ROMs and books on floppy disk are just transitions. Unless legislators interfere in the most ham-handed of ways, computer networks should be the natural homes for electronic books. They could reach us more cheaply, and in greater varieties, without the bottleneck of physical bookstores. So disk standards should be just plain irrelevant in the end. The true raison d’etre for the Internet is its ability to let many kinds of machines share information without the least worry about floppies or magnetic tape. Most of the time I don’t know if my no-name IBM clone is talking to a Mac or a $5-million mainframe. Besides, we mustn’t preserve books just physically; in a videocentric era we also need to help them survive in the minds of readers, particularly those outside the elite. We should spread books far and wide, then, and make the technology as friendly to words as possible.

But tell that to Max. In his eagerness to put down electronic text, Max depicted the _print_ version of _Wired_ magazine as hypocritical. He wrote:

_Although_ Wired _communicates extensively by e-mail with its readers, conducts forums, and makes back issues available on-line, its much-repeated goal of creating a magazine—currently called_ HotWired—_that is especially designed to exist electronically remains fuzzy. For the moment this is no open democracy, and_ Wired _is no computer screen—its bright graphics would make a fashion magazine envious_. Wired _celebrates what doesn’t yet exist by exploiting a format that does: it’s as if a scribe copied out a manuscript extolling the beauty that would one day be print_.

Strange. Just what’s so odd about using old technology to spread word of alternatives, especially the dazzling e-magazines that already enliven the Web? When Nicholas Negroponte published _Being Digital_ (New York: Knopf, 1995), a bestselling collection of his lively _Wired_ essays, some Generation Xers bought it not for themselves but for their parents—which was exactly what Negroponte wanted.

Max is especially off target about _HotWired_. Today, just months after he wrote of the publishers’ “fuzzy” goal, the magazine is one of the most successful on the Net with far more than 100,000 readers. It makes massive use of hyperlinks—the technology I described by way of the Civil War example. Within discussion areas, readers can create links from their posts to text, pictures, and sound elsewhere in the World Wide Web, including their own electronic pages—they needn’t confine themselves to tiny letters to the editor. Simply put, _HotWired_ both praises and exemplifies the new medium.

I couldn’t care less, moreover, if this electronic magazine runs long articles that have come out in print or could have—just so _HotWired_ also gives me new material. Not everyone on the Internet reads the printed _Wired_. One of joys of the Net, moreover, is the ability to offer greater levels of detail for those wanting it. What a grouch Max is. He might as well be a monk lecturing Gutenberg about the glories of calligraphy.

Even _PC Magazine_, one of my favorites, at times can be all wet about the Internet and related topics. A columnist suggested that most people on the Net be forced to pay for each letter sent out; supposedly, Netfolks were too quick to e-mail each other. Excuse me. Such an approach could kill off many of the mailing lists through which academics and nonacademics swap ideas and research notes en masse. A very small fee based on actual costs and Net congestion? Maybe. But not one designed to minimize use. To the columnist, however, the Net’s role as a petri dish may count less than its promise as a corporate mailman. He misses a major point. The Internet is one of the planet’s cheapest ways to transmit knowledge, including the kind that might cure cancer or give us a 150-mpg automobile. While commerce on the Net is laudable, we need those mailing lists as well—and not just for professors but public schools, libraries, charities, psychological support groups, and activists of all ideologies, to name just a few of the better examples. The economics of the Net will make this possible, especially as bandwidths increase to accommodate greater use of audio and video—text just won’t cost that much. Alas, the columnist in this instance failed to understand the Internet and its possibilities.

I myself won’t claim omniscience about the Net. Once I saw a message on a mailing list from someone pushing for a huge National Knowledge Foundation to benefit educators, librarians, journalists, and investigators. The post mentioned international topics, among others, and flares went off in my head. I posted some sharply critical, journalistic questions, wondering if the post had come from a CIA type. Some people on the list cheered me on while I pressed for public answers. It turned out that the post _was_ from a former Company man, and as I persisted in querying Robert David Steele about his funding and motives, he sent me a colorfully worded note that might have made a Paris Island drill instructor envious. I quoted his e-mail, as I would have done if writing this up for a magazine. What a way to justify my fears of the intelligence establishment playing too powerful a role in determining the content of material online. I remembered the valuable exposés that the press had done of the CIA years ago; we need to separate U.S. journalists from spies, lest impartiality of the news media suffer. This debate I would win.

But I didn’t. In fact, I suffered a major debacle; flame after flame from bystanders assailed _me_. Even though I told Robert Steele I wanted public answers, people felt that I had violated the traditional prohibition against quoting private posts in public, at least with names attached. Some of the bluntest Anglo-Saxonisms came from luminaries on the Internet. People wanted perfect freedom to speak their minds in messages deemed private, just as professors and students in class would want to be free to say outrageous things without ending up on the front pages of the local paper. I, on the other hand, had applied journalistic expectations to the Net. A reporter might end up with a better story if a celebrity exploded during an interview and this fact came out in print. But on the Internet, the freedom to be outrageous in private mattered more than the freedom to quote, even with advanced warning. Yes, I had questions about this custom. What if people took advantage of this Netiquette to engage in sexual or racial abuse, or just abuse, period? Should rules really be hard and fast? Just the same, in Net terms, I was the loser here because I wore my Writer Hat at the wrong time.

Luckily the story ended happily. Robert Steele and I, while disagreeing, made our peace. I went to one of his conferences and shook his hand. Later I happily discovered that he shared my hatred of the Clipper chip, the loathsome White House scheme to make it easier to snoop on citizens’ communications. He was far more openminded than I’d originally expected. Even without that consideration, however, a feud just didn’t make sense here. Canter and Siegel may claim you can reach 30 million people in one swoop, but as I say repeatedly, the Net is a _series_ of communities, some of them rather small-townish. Within our somewhat overlapping circles, it would have been mutually harmful for Robert Steele and me to squander time and reputations on a protracted flame war.

Other kinds of clashes take place between Internet culture and that of traditional media types; in the eyes of many people on the Net, print people are not the only villains. _Dateline NBC_ ran a story about children using computer connections to locate recipes for making bombs. The children, however, could have done the same at bookstores or public libraries. _Dateline_’s episode reminded one Netizen of the time NBC secretly used a hidden ignition system to show that an automobile could explode. Just as bizarrely, in print and on the air, some journalists love stories about the Internet as a playground for child molesters. If we on the Net were a religious or ethnic group, we could start an antidefamation league and keep it forever busy.

By Net standards, the media bumble in yet other ways. If you’re a newspaper or magazine journalist, you may have been reared to neuter yourself about The News; no opinions online, please. On the Net, however, many people are suspicious if you do _not_ join the crowd and speak out. They dislike net-thropologists; that is, media people and others who study the Net rather than contribute to it. Among some journalists the standard modus operandi is to post questions for an article, then vanish without sharing anything with the Netfolks.

Happily, this is changing somewhat. In fact, you can find a few journalists from the _New York Times_, _Wall Street Journal_, _Washington Post_, and other major papers speaking up online about matters dear to them. Recently a reader flamed the _Post_ for its Internet coverage (“what those idiots at the _Post_ write isn’t worth minimum wage”). Alluding to software that can screen out messages from offensive people, reporter John Schwartz punched right back: “It’s bozo filter time.” He had been using online services for years, and here, it showed. The old stereotype, in which all members of the major media are clueless, just doesn’t fly any more. Not too long ago somebody shared a _New York Times_ article—discussing some other people’s proposal for a national digital library—with hundreds of a members of a list devoted to law in cyberspace. He did not ask permission from the _Times_. A pithy reference to copyright law then emanated from none other than Peter Lewis, who had written the article and was a regular on the list.

So how are Netfolks treating Lewis nowadays? He e-mailed back an answer in prose worthy of a discussion group on the Internet itself:

_It took me a while to get used to being flamed by pencil-dicked geeks who hide behind their terminals, saying things I’m sure they’d never dream of saying to my face. But now I’ve become something of a connoisseur of flamage, and while I regret that it is widespread on the Net, I regret more that the quality of flaming is almost uniformly weak. I now savor good flames and ignore the rest. On the other hand, it took me almost as long to get used to having instant feedback, often pointed and critical and right-on, to my writing. While there is a danger of a “chilling effect” from flamage, perhaps subtly influencing reporters to back off a subject in anticipation of a flood of “Dear Clueless” letters, I think the overall benefit of instant and widespread reader feedback is a Good Thing. Perhaps all rookie reporters should be required to write a Net story just to let them know that they do not write in a vacuum, whether their beat is the Internet or the police station or sports._

Like the police beat, the Internet comes with its set of rules—as my experience with the CIA alum vividly showed. Some on the Net attach a statement to every post saying it’s copyrighted. Others just worry that the wrong set of people may read and quote their more outspoken messages. Lewis considers list and newsgroup posts to be public: “My mother once advised me, long before she knew I would be a journalist, ‘Never put anything on paper that you wouldn’t want to see on the front page of the _New York Times_.’”

Still, Lewis normally catches up with the writers of posts he plans to quote. “However, the reason has more to do with verification than with netiquette. In cyberland as well as in the real world, as you know, the fact that someone’s name and address appear in a letter does not guarantee the identity of the writer.” Lewis reminded me that “half a century ago some newspapers forbade reporters from quoting sources contacted by telephone on the same rationale: How do you really know that was Mr. Doe on the phone if you didn’t see him? In cyberville, not only can we not see our sources, but neither can we hear them.” And then a few sentences later came the electronic signature, “Pete (at least, you _think_ it’s Pete) Lewis.”[4.8]

Other challenges exist online. When reporters use e-mail for interviews, they take away the element of surprise—often the surest route to the best answer. “Also,” says Jordan Green, a Canadian freelancer who relies heavily on e-mail, “there is no body language or voice intonation in e-mail. We do have our various symbols to >>>highlight<<< and _emphasize_ WORDS and feelings :-) but there is far more which cannot be picked up.”

In the end, however, computer networks will make the press better informed, not worse. Via Lycos, for example, a searching tool on the Web, I can track down files written by just the right person to interview or find background information that someone archived from the relevant newsgroup. Besides, who says that all interviews are confrontational? Often e-mail is just right, and I can always use the telephone to fill in gaps. “I used to ask, ‘What’s your fax number?’ at the end of a phone interview,” says a magazine writer named Peggy Noonan.[4.9] “Now I also ask, ‘What’s your e-mail address’ because it’s often much faster to post a question or send a draft for approval via e-mail than by another means.” Some journalists might object to showing drafts to sources. But Noonan clearly sees the networks as a godsend for other purposes as well.

Another believer is Arik Hesseldahl, a young reporter with the _Idaho State Journal_ in Pocatello who, like many journalists of his generation, grew accustomed to the technology in college. “Remember that flesh-eating bug scare a few months ago?” he said. “I got in touch with a doctor in England who debunked all the rumors and media hype, which is what it was—hype. Just today I am looking for an expert on nuclear fuel reprocessing equipment who is untainted by the Department of Energy and the rest of the federal nuke bureaucracy. Already I’ve gotten five suggestions for experts.”

I myself see other advantages for people in the pulped-wood world; via the Net I don’t just approach editors—I hear from them out of the blue when they like my postings. Other freelancers have also benefited. Steven Sander Ross, a professor at Columbia University, uses the Net to communicate with European magazines that pay better than those in the States. Just as the Net creates global markets for florists and sellers of teddy bears, it multiplies opportunities for the best writers. That is true for newspaper and magazine writers now and will be increasingly true for authors of books. Mind you, there is a downside, too. The Net may actually _hurt_ the worst writers as they face more competition, whether from professionals across the planet or from the free material that Netfolks share with each other.

Here are three case histories that should be of interest to writers, editors, publishers, and the rest of the cosmos:

• Case History 1. The _News & Observer_ has used the Internet not only to reach the denizens but also to get existing readers and advertisers on the Net. In an era when so many greedsters hope to charge outrageous fees to consumers for online information, the _N & O_ is hoping that ads will pay much or even most of the freight.

• Case History 2. Time Warner, as noted, is putting magazines and book excerpts on the Internet, and it’s doing so in ways befitting the medium. Many of the same concepts carry over from online newspapers, which is why this section and the next will be much shorter than Case History 1. In fact, so far, an _N & O_-style business model seems to be influencing Time at least somewhat.

• Case History 3. Laura Fillmore runs an online bookstore that not only sells books but _gives them away_ on the Internet. She even used the Net to promote a pulped-wood book that has sold hundreds of thousands of copies. Fillmore’s ideas are significant because she is working hard to reconcile publishers’ needs with those of society at large, and I commend one of her business models as an alternative to pay-per-read gouges. The ultimate answer, in my own opinion, is a national digital library and a program to drive down the cost of book-friendly hardware. Using this approach—a mix of editorial and technical wizardry to add to the value of plain text—good publishers would flourish. Readers and writers would come out ahead, too.

Finally, I’ll offer an update on the _N & O_ and other publications on the Internet. When Frank Daniels described the Net as “unorganized” and “unruly,” he might also have been talking about certain trends in his own industry. A surprising twist unfolded in the story of the _N & O_.

Newspapers on the Net: The Raleigh Experiment

More than two decades ago in a scuffy-floored room at the University of North Carolina, not that far from the _N & O_, I heard Professor Walter Spearman expound on the prickly question of uppity letters to the editor. What if a reader taunted, “You’ll never print this?” The crux of Walt Spearman’s wisdom was this: _Don’t go for the bait. If you don’t want to print it, don’t._[4.10] He was teaching me to be, in modern parlance, a “gatekeeper”—to decide which news and opinions made it into print and which didn’t. Only so many column inches existed on the editorial page, and we journalists were to watch over this space as if it were the Mona Lisa. Without the slightest apology, we should tell the public what to read, and besides lording over the editorial pages, we should inflict the same front page stories on everyone. The notion that each reader could write regularly for other readers, or that he or she could see wire service stories online, was as sacrilegious as it was science fiction-like.

By the end of the 1970s, however, at Duke, UNC, and N.C. State, hackers were paving the way for Usenet, a series of discussion areas on the Internet and on bulletin board systems that let _everyone_ have a say—from Nazis to Maoists. Together with talk radio and with other forms of computer communications, Usenet could help Americans bypass the gatekeepers. Readers wouldn’t see on their screens an appealing combination of headlines and Times Roman type. But no blue pencils would be around to scratch out the heresies of nonjournalists.

Usenet in the end wouldn’t just carry alt.activism or comp.general or alt.sex; it would also be home to a nice little electronic newspaper called ClariNet, which in 1995 enjoyed 100,000-plus readers, and which each day let readers choose from among hundreds of dispatches from Reuters, the Associated Press, and more specialized services. My friend Jim Besser covered Washington for a string of Jewish newspapers. He could dial up ClariNet, other sections of Usenet, and the Internet at large and see material that might take days and days to wend its way into the _Washington Post_, assuming it ever got there at all. Usenet in the end was more of a wire service than a newspaper; that just may have been its real triumph. Some old print people hated ClariNet, seeing it as a threat to their gatekeeping. For a while, ClariNet sent out the columns of Dave Barry, the quirky but popular humorist enjoyed by thousands of Netheads. Then, however, his syndicate pulled him off the service. Illegal copies had wafted all over the Internet, and the bootlegging had surely outraged client newspapers—the main reason; but a second, minor one may have existed as well—the hostility between the Net and many members of the print media.

The Internet was partly why Michael Crichton, the author of the novel _Jurassic Park_, could shrug off newspapers and some other mass media as “tomorrow’s fossil fuel.” The Cable News Network and radio talk shows are not the only threats to the hegemony of the old-time gatekeepers. So are the Internet, CompuServe, America Online, GEnie, Delphi, and, of course, the more than 50,000 bulletin board systems run by hobbyists and others. “Newspapers,” wrote the media critic Jon Katz, “have been foundering for decades, their readers aging, their revenues declining, their circulations sinking, their sense of mission fragmented in a world where the fate of presidents is slugged out on MTV, _Donahue_, and _Larry King Live_.”

I was fascinated, then, to learn that the old _News & Observer_ was on the Net now. Was the _N & O_ serving readers better? With the above in mind I spent several weeks talking to the Raleigh people on the phone and via e-mail, and studying the electronic versions of the newspaper, both the free samples on the Net and the version for paying customers.

My conclusions were positive, though not entirely. Katz, the author of the “Still Suck” article in _Wired_, would have disliked some aspects of the _N & O_’s electronic efforts. _Wired_ had asked, “How can an industry which regularly pulls Doonesbury strips for being too controversial possibly hope to survive online?” And, sure enough, if you were on the Internet by way of the _N & O_’s service in fall 1994, you couldn’t subscribe to the alt.sex string of newsgroups. Moreover, unlike the _Time_ areas online, the _N & O_’s BBS had not sprouted hundreds of messages from free-spirited readers and editors. Truly controversial postings were rare. And yet the editors were clearly moving away from the traditional gatekeeping role. Meanwhile, the _N & O_ was enriching the Internet by way of well-written news stories and features—many available for free. Flaws aside, this was a fine example of how the print media could befriend the Net and the young people who favored computer screens over pulped wood.

Frank Daniels III, the executive editor, tinkered with computers himself in high school two decades ago, and as early as the late 1980s he was using Macs to shuffle around stories on the pages of a magazine that his family owned in Charlotte, North Carolina. Working with a stock analyst, Daniels created a computerized database of the top fifty companies in the Charlotte area, and that, in turn, led to a newsletter. So early on, Daniels saw how high tech could spawn lucrative opportunities. He also saw the negatives. The owners of the _Los Angeles Times_, Knight-Ridder, and other organizations were experimenting with Videotext, which allowed news stories to scroll across television screens.

Such endeavors were brave. They were also premature. Videotext at the time cost the customers too much, and just as the Prodigy service would err later on in the same way, the newspapers failed to appreciate the fondness of many customers for typing to each other. Reading news stories and shopping from home weren’t enough.

Many U.S. dailies would go on to flounder even on pulped wood. Whether Americans were watching video-cassettes or hang gliding, millions had other uses for their time, especially baby boomers. Some 60 percent of the households in Wake County had once subscribed to the _N & O_; by the late 1980s, just 40 percent did. Newspapers kissed off much of the market, jacked up their prices, and began seeing themselves as a way for advertisers to reach at least the Oldsmobile set if not the BMW set. And yet, even by those criteria, the _N & O_ was a slacker. Back then, as it does today, the Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill area boasted one of the highest concentrations of Ph.D.s in the country. Some 40 percent of the households now own computers, more than 10 percent can go online, and the average home price is well on the way to equaling that of some major metropolitan areas. Even five years ago, and long before, high tech was enriching the Research Triangle.

But would the _N & O_ adapt to this new market, a harbinger for many other areas in the United States and elsewhere? Frank Daniels saw the newspaper as a change-proof antique, and he was ready to dump his _N & O_ stock and sink the money into an online service.

Then Daniels got some journalistic religion at a newspaper seminar, the secular equivalent of a good Baptist soaking. To hear him tell it, he suddenly understood that “the relationship between a newspaper and a community has such a richness and history that communities shouldn’t lose that.” And he felt that online services could take advantage of those relationships with readers and advertisers. Today the _N & O_ goes by this philosophy, not entirely but to a great extent. Readers can e-mail many of their favorite writers, while long-time advertisers can buy _X_ number of column inches in the paper editions and receive exposure in the electronic editions.

Something else, however, may have bound Frank Daniels to his paper as well—old family stories and the memories they stirred. The first Daniels landed in North Carolina several hundred years ago, and the family reunions continue to this day. Frank III’s great-grandfather, Josephus Daniels, purchased the _N & O_ at a bankruptcy auction in 1894. He carried on as one of the state’s more colorful and outspoken publishers, with a strong populist streak, and took time off in Washington to serve as secretary of the Navy under Woodrow Wilson. I ran across Josephus on the Internet, just as serendipitously as I had found A. C. Snow. Through the American Memory Project at the Library of Congress, I could _hear_ Josephus honor two naval heroes with a speech called “There Is No Rank in Sacrifice.” I passed on word of my discovery to Bruce Siceloff, an online editor, and he played another Daniels’ speech for the clan while showing off the paper’s marvels of technology. Frank Jr., publisher of the _N & O_, tapped the arm of a cousin who had just walked into the room. “That’s your grandfather,” he said as the spooky old wax recording crackled away in its new electronic incarnation.[4.11]

Josephus, though his racial views softened, reflected the separatism of many Carolinians in the first half of the twentieth century. The paper itself changed. It eventually hired Claude Sitton, a Pulitzer winner notable for his civil rights reporting in his days with the _New York Times_. The _N & O_ in some ways became the _Times South_. Reporters fought racial injustices. Frank III portrayed the paper of that era as never having met a cause it didn’t like. What’s more, he said the _N & O_, although exposing politicians on the take, was too quick to editorialize for local programs that raised local tax rates. I myself favored the crusading kind of newspaper—in fact, one risk of a high-tech orientation was that it could turn a newspaper into an uncritical cheerleader for business if editors were not careful—but I could understand Daniels’ concern over government spending. At any rate some felt that the _N & O_ was losing touch with many readers, and so Frank Jr. and the others on the board of directors agreed to let Frank III serve as executive editor in the wake of Sitton’s retirement.

The contrast between the old and new editors couldn’t have been more stark. Sitton was a formal man who insisted that his reporters wear suits and ties. Frank III relaxed the dress code. In place of a sign with his editorial title, he stuck up one that said simply, “Frat Man.” Old-timers groaned that this young Duke alum lacked enough journalistic experience. The man had been the newspaper’s _operations manager_. Wasn’t it apparent? For each year of experience on the State side of newspapering, you could subtract two years of experience with the Church.

Even under Sitton, the reporters typed away on a modern publishing system for newspapers. But that was more or less all they did—write. Many could just as well have been pounding away on old Smith Coronas. They hadn’t any desire to learn the technology, not when there were doors to knock on, vote counts to check, political corruption to chronicle, Ku Klux Klan rallies to report, and courthouse records to search the old-fashioned way. Young Daniels set to work changing all that, and with the most surpassing of allies. The news librarians almost instantly grasped the potential of computerized databases. So did Pat Stith, the senior investigative reporter. The _N & O_ would go on to collect state records showing traffic or hunting violations, or others, and then seek out patterns. “We analyzed all the speeding tickets,” said Daniels, “and found out what percentage of tickets were given at each mile-per-hour level. It turns out that if you go 63 miles per hour in a 55-mile-per-hour zone, you have less than a 1 percent chance of getting a ticket.” Via the same quantitative techniques, the _N & O_ could evaluate the programs of local government. By the time Daniels had effected his transformation, he had squeezed dozens of personal computers into an already-crowded newsroom.

A year or so after Frank Daniels III became executive editor, he first beheld the Internet over at North Carolina State. “An engineering student said, ‘Have you seen this?’ and he showed me Usenet. And about forty-five minutes later, while I was thirty minutes late for a meeting, I was speechless. I walked out. I was just buzzing with the possibilities.” Daniels saw some engineering newsgroups and, yes, some sexually related ones. “I couldn’t believe how many people I saw talking together, just following each other’s conversations. The letters to the editor at the time were the only connection the _News & Observer_ had with its readers.

“Our business is connecting people. Here was a whole world that existed without our knowledge. It was a small world and an elitist world, but it confirmed my earlier belief that computers were going to be ubiquitous.”

Effortlessly Daniels understood that Usenet wasn’t Videotext—people _wanted_ you to talk back. So the Internet was at least on his mind as a possibility for the time when the numbers were right. Daniels for the moment pushed into less exotic areas; for example, he started a useful, lively, but expensive fax newsletter for the elite, _The Insider_, which covered North Carolina politics with a commitment to detail missing from the daily press. The _N & O_ also offered sophisticated research services, using the databases it was amassing. And the paper let readers dial up stories over the telephone through a technology known as Audiotext.

The electronic action, however, really took off after Daniels hired George Schlukbier, a computer-oriented librarian who had worked wonders at the _Sacramento Bee_. Like Daniels the frat boy, Schlukbier flaunted a few eccentricities within bounds. An electronic signature at the bottom of his Internet messages identified him as “Chief Bull Goose Looney,” a tribute to the giant Indian who terrorized Nurse Ratched in _One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest_, the Ken Kesey novel. Some, of course, might argue that the Internet is itself a virtual asylum with the inmates in charge.

Schlukbier and Daniels checked out Prodigy and America Online to see about getting on those networks and decided that the numbers stank. Yes, Prodigy-style services already had their networks in place, and the _Los Angeles Times_ and papers in George, New York and elsewhere would go on to sign up. But the _N & O_ concluded—rightly, in my opinion—that the online services would need the newspapers more than the newspapers would need the online services. Newspapers were the best source of steady, detailed news about local communities. Each year the _N & O_ spent $12 million covering mainly local and state news, an amount that even a giant like Prodigy could not replicate everywhere. “They’ve got their view of the world that’s defined by whatever technology they adopted at the time they started their service,” Daniels would later say. “We got uncomfortable with the fact we’d be living their rules, and the customers would be their customers.”[4.12]

Some other newspapers felt happy with Prodigy. “No,” said Mike Gordon, an editor with Cox Newspapers in Atlanta, “Prodigy isn’t taking most of the money.” What’s more, his online edition could enjoy revenue from online ads. Still, more and more publishers were turning to the Internet rather than Prodigy-type alternatives, and the balance of power changed. When Microsoft started a new online service later, it offered newspapers as much as 80 percent of revenue—at least several times the amount that Prodigy had offered the _N & O_. (The Atlanta papers would themselves end up on the Internet eventually, not just on Prodigy.)

Instead of relying on a Prodigy-style service, Schlukbier started a locally oriented BBS with an Internet connection and a strong emphasis on schoolchildren, not just the adult readers of today. This orientation may have baffled many. Some newspaper publishers were too myopic to see past the next quarter, especially if they worked for the big chains. Exceptions did exist, of course. Knight-Ridder, for example, regardless of its public ownership and its Videotext flop, was still pouring millions into the new technology. As a family-owned newspaper, however, without security analysts breathing down its corporate neck, the _N & O_ was especially free to experiment. Schlukbier believed that a decade would pass before 40 or 50 percent of the homes in Raleigh were online, and by then the children would be of customer age.

“By focusing on third-graders,” Schlukbier said, “I’ve got ten years to learn from them what information they really need and want.”[4.13] What they hoped for, in many ways, didn’t seem like a newspaper at all. Rather they wanted their own tools. The bulletin board blossomed with imaginary worlds in which, for example, Frank Daniels was the owner of a fictitious newsstand. Children could wend their ways through cyberspace by using written descriptions and computer commands to tell where they were and what they were doing. George Schlukbier’s young son, Shane, designed a mythical camp online with danger-ridden woods. Some may have wondered how this applied to _newspapers_; I myself did. And then it dawned: if newspapers would be increasingly two-way in the future, just like the Net, then didn’t it make sense to see how the children interacted with each other, as they did in role-playing games? The children could change as they grew older, or moved away from the area when their parents packed up for another job with IBM, but the journalists could still observe the basic patterns.

The _N & O_ put more than 6,000 children and 700 teachers online for free. NandOLand was the name of the educational service designed with children in mind; a mouse click on a cloud, for example, would take children to a NASA area on the Net. The students could send electronic mail to each other or type to each other instantly. “I have seen children who never cared what they wrote turn to a dictionary rather than send a letter to a key pal with misspelled words,” said a teacher named Stephanie Toney. “I have seen a child with a severe reading disability sit for hours and concentrate on e-mail to another person on the other side of the world. His English teacher would have given her right arm to interest him in reading and writing for this period of time.”

Granted, NandOLand wasn’t the entire solution to the needs of children. Many couldn’t spend much time on a machine at school and lacked one at home. But the program was much better than the alternative: expensive school connections to the Net or no Internet at all.

Like the children, the _N & O_ itself was learning—about the local schools and other institutions and the Net itself. “How many newspaper editors and reporters get to talk with students, parents, and teachers any time they want to without making a big deal of it?” asked Daniels.[4.14] And so the educational coverage was better. Rosalind Resnick, publisher of _Interactive Publishing Alert_, wrote that the _N & O_ was “at the head of the pack when it comes to promoting interactivity between its readers and reporters.” By the summer of 1995 every staff member, including those in circulation and advertising, would be able to go on the Net from their desks. Daniels’ own Net address showed up on the paper’s editorial page each day. The _N & O_ was publishing a dozen or two Internet items each month, complete with a column called “Net Rider.” How different the paper was from a rival in nearby Durham: “We don’t print many Internet stories,” a staffer there said when I asked to speak to whoever covered the Net. The words were spoken almost in a way to suggest that “Internet” was synonymous with “_N & O_.”

Not everyone was happy with the _N & O_’s Internet service. Around 700 people had subscribed commercially by fall 1994, paying $20 a month, and some rightly complained about the look and feel of the BBS and the busy phone lines they had encountered during the summer. When I posted a query on the Internet, at least half of the replies were hostile to the online _N & O_. Some showed a knee-jerk hatred because they disagreed with the paper’s politics. But others were right on target. The BBS incarnation of NandO.Net, the name for the commercial part of the online endeavors, was more of a rutted dirt road than an eight-lane information highway. Customers for some months had trouble dialing up the service’s modems for want of enough phone lines. Other glitches arose. The service prided itself on the ability to whip people back and forth between the local board and the Internet-related services without any effort. And yet in making the transitions, customers suffered delays and software glitches that they might not encounter with a more polished service. Schoolchildren and BBS junkies were the best kinds of people to enjoy the wild ride and the scenery.

The online _N & O_ responded with some technical improvements; the paper added many more phone lines and gave customers the ability to use Mosaic to point and click their way through the Web. Mosaic had a much smoother feel than the BBS software. By late 1994 the _N & O_ was offering the public an electronic newspaper and the Internet at the competitive rate of $20 a month while helping to subsidize the educational side. And it was serving people with different levels of equipment. The BBS was designed to work especially well with less powerful machines and snailish modems that were far too slow for Mosaic.

On the Net, the people who answered my queries had another major complaint—the inability of NandO.Net to make alt.sex-style groups conveniently available. Frank Daniels made no apologies. However liberal towns like Chapel Hill might be, the state as a whole was of the opposite bent. And that included more than a few church-goers in Raleigh. “The community standards of our community don’t mix with some of the sexual parts of Usenet,” Daniels said, “so we edit them out.” In addition, most subscribers were children. “I have a seven year old,” he said, “and I don’t want him delving into alt.sex.bestiality or those other places.” Many of the Netheads would have said that one person’s “editing” was another’s “censorship.” I myself, however, understood Daniel’s worries. At least two other Net services were available in the same area, so it wasn’t as if he were gatekeeping for the entire town; what’s more, he said that when the software allowed, the sex-related newsgroups would be available as an option. Just the same, the issue epitomized the clash between the gatekeeping ethos and that of the Internet.

More serious than the lack of alt.sex, to my mind, was Daniels’ failure to appreciate sufficiently the political freedom of Usenet, the same service that had attracted him to the Internet in the first place. I complained to him that his own BBS included far, far less in the way of political discussion than I’d have wanted, and I contrasted this to the robust debates of Usenet. “To be honest, David,” he said, “I think one of the least useful pieces of the Internet so far is their political discussions. They’re not very good ones. There’s a lot of flaming. The political discussions aren’t very productive. I follow mainly the local ones here. These people discuss national issues and never have a policymaker looking in there. So why discuss it if it isn’t going to have an impact on policy?”

While Daniels was worlds ahead of newspaper editors at large, he was showing the vestiges of the gatekeeping mindset that the new technology had made obsolete. I myself disliked unmitigated flaming. And yet there were times when harsh words were called for. The _N & O_ didn’t wimp out when the editorial board attacked the Ku Klux Klan or the more outrageous statements of Jesse Helms, the right-wing senator. Why should people online be any different? And although it might be nice for a policymaker to read my public messages as soon as I sent them out—and, yes, I could recall hearing out of the blue from the White House after one such posting—that was hardly necessary. Democracy isn’t just a citizen writing to a congressman. It is also citizens communicating with citizens, educating, proselytizing; and with the economies of Usenet, more citizens could reach their peers for greater enlightenment. And then, if a consensus were reached, political action might ensue, such as letters to Congress. So why must politicians be involved from Day One? Daniels was out of touch here, and I hoped he’d catch on.

Admittedly NandO.Netters could hook up with the Usenet political areas, even if the _N & O_ played them down; but the newspaper didn’t really promote political debates on the BBS itself. And it was not just because Daniels believed that the readers disliked flaming and extremism—it was also because he felt that real, live politicians were not ready for online appearances yet. “When we can get commitment from the politicians and policymakers, then we’ll make a push at it. But not until it becomes something where our community can have really productive discussions. I don’t want to train them not to like them. What happens is that the people on the Net are trained not to like them. Extremists and flamers love them.” I supposed there were a lot of us undesirables, however; for alt.activism and similar areas were among the more popular newsgroups on the Net—no match for alt.sex, but certainly not small time.

If Daniels had had a complete set of Net values, he would have understood the benefits of debate online, and not just the political action but the _education_. I myself was liberal. And yet when discussing information policy, I could learn at times from the most zealous of Libertarians and Objectivists. Some were among the most advanced of the technologists. In fact, their technical backgrounds may have led to their hatred of regulation—they loathed the bureaucrats who could not fathom the direction in which computers and communications were headed.

To his credit, Daniels at least was not calling for censorship of Usenet; he was merely saying that he wanted his own service to be different. What’s more, technology and marketing forces, the great deciders of cyberspace, might change his mind for him.

Just as he had assumed in the first place, people on the Net wanted to _talk_—not just to the _N & O_ but to each other about all kinds of topics, including material in the paper itself. And the more comfortable the readers grew with the online world, the more spirited, the more Usenet-like, would be the discussions. No, the meek would not suddenly turn into flamers. But the thrill of technology would be less of a distraction, and they would pay more heed to what they had to say and grow more adventurous about it. On the _N & O_’s present BBS, with its often awkward commands, many people were not even leaving messages for each other. Instead they typically used the system at a more primitive level to type out their thoughts with the other person online at the same time. I hated this approach. It brought to mind Dave Barry’s crack that the Internet was like CB radio with typing.

Even if Daniels still did not enjoy the political debates on the Net itself, he was living up to the old tradition of sharing material with the rest of the world. In that sense his newspaper was exemplary. The _N & O_ didn’t just offer news, discussion areas, and games for its subscribers: Sample news and features were free to anyone who wanted to read them. That was how I’d first run across A.C. Snow. I’d seen the _N & O_’s name on a list of newspapers, and A.C. had caught my eye as I was wandering through the Gopher that stored sample news stories and columns from the paper. The World Wide Web, however, was the best way to try out the electronic _N & O_. When I dialed up the main page for NandO.Net, I could see a colorful, bluish logo and enjoy a newsstandish atmosphere, with scads of goodies to explore. The _N & O_ differed from many electronic newspapers. It didn’t just inflict on readers a digest of generic news, with only the most cursory helping of original material.

I read samples from the regular _N & O_ and specialized publications such as the _Insider_; enjoyed brief but regularly updated electronic news intended for the Net itself; wandered through a little bookstore with cover shots from books by Snow and other columnists; wended my way through tens of thousands of words from a journalism seminar at Harvard; soaked up long, multimedia features; dialed up samples of rock music; and ventured into the sports area—the _N & O_’s most popular material on the Web.

The sports area was the baby of a bearded, forty-something editor named Eric Harris who had turned into a Nethead, and who like Schlukbier came with a nickname: “Zonker.” A child, seeing the beard and taking in the personality, had compared him to the Doonesbury character. That was a little unfair. Zonker of the comics is a goof-off, while Zonker of the Net is a workaholic whose messages might bear 4 A.M. time stamps. Harris is Webmaster—the man with the daily responsibility for the content of the Web area in general—but his true love was sports. He packed the server with game schedules. During the ’94 baseball strike the _N & O_ indulged fans with whimsy such as “Cybersox Take the World Series”—reportage of mythical games. “Need something to do while we wait for the owners and players to resolve their differences?” the Web area asked on another electronic page. “Well, the Baseball Server is doing its part. Download the above images, tack them onto the wall, and buy a set of darts. Then, every time you feel a twinge of baseball withdrawal, grab a dart, think a ‘warm’ thought about one of the participants, and let the fun begin.” And sure enough, Netfolks could print out pictures of the villains, each of whom had a superimposed picture of a dartboard and the wonderful caption: “The only losers are the fans.”

The _N & O_ also shared with the Net a variety of other material, of which my favorite was North Carolina Discoveries. A lively feature writer named Julie Ann Powers sought out offbeat places. In Lake Norman, for example, she found that “houses and hangars ring the airstrip and each lot comes with a grass taxiway to the paved and lighted runway.” In Orient, a hamburger-and-hot-dog cook named Red Lee claimed that at twenty-five cents each, his offerings were the cheapest in the country. And in Tryon, the publishers of the _Daily Bulletin_ said that at 8 by 11 inches, their newspaper might be the smallest in the world. Powers drove from town to town in a Ford Explorer that she had nicknamed Barlowe after Arthur Barlowe—one of the first Europeans to behold the state of North Carolina. Barlowe was a gadgeteer’s heaven on wheels, full of audio and video equipment. People on the Web didn’t just enjoy gloriously descriptive stories from Powers: with Mosaic-style software they could _see_ a picture of her wearing a sun hat on a beach or gaze at sand dunes or waterfalls or whatever she happened to be writing about at the time. If they owned a sound card, they could _hear_, too. She walked around carrying a microphone so large that it resembled a folded-up umbrella.

Powers might well be one of the first multimedia reporters to work for a Net-oriented daily newspaper. I asked her to share a few trade secrets. She said she interviewed people twice. The first time she gathered the basics for her regular story; the second time they spoke while tape rolled. Powers said she never knew which sounds would work out and which wouldn’t. A recording of a glorious waterfall ended up sounding like a toilet flushing.

I asked about the challenge of balancing her traditional duties as a reporter with those as an audio-oriented interviewer. Some old hands in the _N & O_ newsroom saw the gadgetry as a threat. It was all too remindful of the days when computers were replacing typewriters in the newsroom, and many reporters and editors balked at being typesetters. But Powers turned the new technology to her advantage. The microphone and electronic camera—a photographer followed her around—made her more aware of her surroundings and sensitive to new story angles. Once she did a story on Ten Commandment Mountain. It was part of a Biblical theme park, a peak in western North Carolina with God’s words spelled out in “concrete letters each measuring five feet high and four feet wide.” A roar from a giant lawn mower kept drowning out the voice of the man she was interviewing. “They always ask,” he volunteered, “how do you mow that mountain?” Presto, she had the magic quote to use near the lead. “A special mower with a low center of gravity,” she revealed, “tilts and leans up and down the steep planes.”

Whether reading about twenty-five-cent hamburgers or godly peaks, I could scoot easily between pictures and words. The _N & O_ had a “North Carolina Discoveries” logo at the top of one page, a picture of Powers in the same area, and then a list of the Discoveries stories that she had done. By clicking my mouse on a list of story headlines in blue letters, I could immediately go to the stories. When I chose “Home Sweet Hangar,” I sped to the same headline atop a color photo of an aviation buff inspecting “his Cessna 172 after rolling it out of the hangar at his house in Lake Norman Airpark.” Yes, the caption was there too. And then I saw the story lead with an apt quote (“It’s like being an avid golfer and living on the golf course”) followed by a list of other items. I could choose “Audio: Talking about life on the flight line” if I wanted to hear an interview. What’s more, if I’d set up my software, I could even have picked “Video” and gone on to a list of short movies. I also saw background items such as a list of “Triangle-area flight schools” and “FAA regulations: How to get your pilot’s license.” The beauty of this arrangement was that the _N & O_ could provide all kinds of wonderful details for the interested without inflicting them on others. Unless they mouse-clicked the appropriate words in blue letters (or whatever the special color), they would never see the material.

The _N & O_ used the same approach on news stories. When North Carolina was about to gas a man named David Lawson, readers could click on the item “The Lawson Execution.” They could see a schedule of the events ahead—from Lawson’s removal from his cell to the EKG examination that would help certify his death. After the Associated Press reported the execution, readers could click on a headline and read the details. They could even summon up “Preparing for the execution” or “How the gas chamber works.”

The Lawson story was a just a sample—the _N & O_ at the time wasn’t constantly doing multimedia on breaking news—but it was easy to envision the future for American newspapers using the Web. Imagine the blessings for journalists who wanted to write on neat little odds and ends without getting in the way of their main articles. They could merely add “links” to offshoot stories. Perhaps the reader could even click and summon up a collateral audio report or even a video. At first it might be hard to do all this on deadline, but links would be a cinch as software improved. What’s more, newspaper writers might evolve into true personalities just like their counterparts on television. After all, if a reporter’s byline were in blue letters, you could click your mouse to see a photo and maybe even a bio featuring credentials—you could find out, for example, if the legal reporter held a law degree. You could also quickly locate copies of earlier work or a list of his or her favorite books.

Granted, electronic newspapers posed new challenges. Not all stories lent themselves to multimedia, for example. What if newspapers played down those that didn’t? “If you tried to do that with a lot of news stories,” Julie Powers told me, “you would end up serving the video masters rather than the news functions.” Still, in the end, the reader would enjoy far more choices than before.

The Web, as I saw it, held out yet other possibilities for local papers such as the _N & O_. Suppose you lived in Chapel Hill and wanted to see what news had happened there in the past 24 hours; you could click on a map of the Raleigh area and behold a story list from your town. Neighborhood-level submaps could show still more. You could read the most minor tidbits—for example, new requests for zoning changes or items from neighborhood newsletters. Even more helpful, you could find old stories and other background information. Let’s say you were shopping for a condo on a certain street. You might think the neighborhood was safe—Chapel Hill is a university town, remember—but learn that many crimes had occurred nearby. Furthermore, you could adjust the _kind_ of information that you summoned from the Web. For example, you could see lists of houses for sale in a neighborhood and then retrieve their photos along with audio sales presentations. Moving on to another information category, you could uncover lists of nearby stores or see test scores from the closest elementary school. And you might even see ads from nearby restaurants and click on them to order.

The food-related examples weren’t entirely hypothetical; Zonker Harris pointed me toward me some mock ads from Hardee’s and a chain called Little Caesar’s Pizza. The same business principles I discussed in