The evidence I have gathered visiting online newsrooms in Catalonia supports the points you stated. Online journalists are conscious of the features of the Internet, but they admit that they sacrifice most of them for the sake of immediacy (permanent updating), which is the main value for them when comparing online journalism to traditional journalism.

They have two arguments for that: 1) The tension for permanent updating gives them no time to elaborate on the wires or the traditional counterparts pieces. They have to publish them as soon as possible. 2) They claim that online users do not want deep stories, but quick and easy reading, an overview of what is going on, cause they can buy the newspaper if they want more details.

I like to say that there are many utopias in online journalism (the bottomless newshole is one of them) that online journalists try to meet, but in most cases they just use them to justify why they don’t go further from traditional newswriting: the material conditions of their work and the professional culture of traditional journalism heavily limit the possibilities of the utopias to turn into realities.

Only one of the cases I studied (www.lamalla.net) was systematically adding external links to the stories. But in their case they are a pure-digital outlet and they are conscious that they cannot compete with the mainstream media in immediacy, so they try to work more thoroughly their news stories. Even so, they don’t usually do complex stories, but 3-5 paragraph stories.

Special features (mini-webs about a concrete issue) are the space to explore the utopias. There there is innovation in the bottomless newshole, but it is hard to translate this concrete time-limited efforts into a daily routine.

You can find more on these preliminary results at:
http://www.cibersociedad.net/congres2004/grups/fitxacom_publica2.php?grup=89&id=112&idioma=en

David Domingo
david.domingo [at] urv.net
Universitat Rovira i Virgili

About the limitless newshole I wanted to add that here in Spain there are little interesting experiences of using this availability. While I was working at La Vanguardia, we noticed that we had a lot of correspondents all over the world (New York, Washington, Paris, London, Beijing, Moscow

A theme that I took from this article is that many news site publishers deluded themselves into thinking that Internet news would not be labor intensive and expensive. Almost every point you make shows how automation and technology are producing a somewhat bland but satisfactory, efficient, cost-effective and more and more profitable product. But technology is not the only answer to letting the Web live up to its potential. To make online news better requires editors having time to do more than check to make sure the automation is working. You need the commitment of management to invest in their news site and see it as more than a downstream product, more than a drain on what I think will be short-term only 30% margins.

The promise of the Web, as you point out, is a depth and richness of information and story-telling that will only be achieved when, in my opinion, one of two things happens:

1) Traditional news companies thinking about their long-term survival see the Web as an extension of their brand (or even the survival of their brand) and are willing to invest more in it for an admitted short-term shaving of very high profit margins, or

2) Traditional news companies continue cutting costs to keep margins high, and the likes of Yahoo!, Google, MSN, eBay, Craigslist, Movable Type, Flikr, open-source community publishing, etc., take such a hard bite out of a newspaper’s high profit margin that the paper is forced to invest to fight back. Finally, then, the paper will treat its Web site as something far more than a downstream product.

I’m hoping for #1, because #2 means that many companies without a history of journalism ethics and principles will be controlling the flow of news and information.

Gary Kebbel
gary@garykebbel.com

That said, one lesson smart folks have learned online is that you do not need to spend huge sums of money to create online content of good quality. Many, if not most, financially and editorially successful online content sites have found ways to enable the reader-to-reader contact that the print-to-online pioneers in this industry pretty much missed.

Much like music fans discovered years ago that you don’t need a server-client network to move music around the ‘net, readers are discovering that one does not need a newsroom-reader relationship to deliver news. Readers can report significant incidents, documents and conversations directly to others without a newsroom to organize that delivery.

Don’t read this development as an obituary for journalism. Readers still need some agent to facilitate the delivery of news information, even if it is from reader to reader. Journalists, and some of the rules and traditions we’ve developed over decades, should help craft the protocols and systems that will connect readers with other readers’ reports and with professional correspondents online.

Unfortunately, print news companies, drunk with their 40-percent profit margins, have shown little desire to invent new editorial systems, beyond their initial, weak attempts at creating online newsrooms and portal companies. New Century Network crashed, the tech stock market tanked, and newspaper companies retreated into building proprietary online publishing systems, locking their companies’ sites into straightjacket formats that would discourage future attempts at innovation.

Indie online sites that employed traditional newsroom models have also struggled financially, as the lower costs of doing business online floods the market with competiting sites, professional and amateur, keeping down ad rates and making the expense of supporting a traditional newsroom unbearable at “old media” profit margins.

That’s why I think an examination of the field 10 years from now will look not at ways that traditional newsrooms could employ online technology, but at how online technology transformed the structure and function of what we now call the newsroom.

1. There is this paragraph: “When news seekers want comprehensive, in-depth coverage they find it themselves through news site hopping. News aggregators like Google News facilitate this. Are you really interested in Bernard Ebbers

John Roberts
CNET News.com product development
http://www.news.com/

I’ve written more about that here:
http://blog.contentious.com/archives/2005/03/25/the-news-aint-what-it-used-to-be

I also just blogged about Nora’s article in Poynter’s E-Media Tidbits group weblog. It should be up there shortly.

- Amy Gahran
Editor, CONTENTIOUS