"We made a medium out of a game, and it is no mean feat." -- Gianni Riotta, LaStampa.it

In 1996, at the dawn of Web usage on my side of the world, I used to visit AJR Newslink, marvelling at the debate on print versus online journalism, and staring overawed at the job ads for Web editors. At the time, most European newspapers didn't even have a Web presence beyond a breaking news slot within AOL or Compuserve. The Web may well be born in Switzerland, but online journalism is an American invention.

Much has changed since then. Although America remains the cradle of all things online, Western European e-journalism is catching up fast. Nowadays the online editions of, say, The New York Times or The Washington Post do not look much more sophisticated than La Repubblica, El Pais or the Guardian.

Sure, European publishers have made their fair share of mistakes, wasting time and resources on the Internet gold rush, just as other media companies did everywhere else. But the Web sites of many European newspapers and magazines - with the notable exception of France "look more dynamic than their American equivalents."

European newspapers, for example, have wholeheartedly embraced 'reader-meets-writer' forums and Weblogs.

Guardian Unlimited, the online edition of British newspaper the Guardian, was among the pioneers of corporate media Weblogging in Europe with its international news Weblog.

	Coming later to the market also meant that European publishers had the chance to assess the threat to revenues posed by independent start-up companies.

"We looked at the amount of self-publishing that was going on in America and thought it was a shame that there wasn't an equivalent in Britain,"says Christian Alden who, together with the Guardian Unlimited news team, is the brains behind the site's Weblog. "Then we looked at what our readers wanted online: Depth of coverage and links. The need for Weblogs clearly existed but there was nothing on the same self-publishing scale as in America. We saw a gap in the market and decided to fill it by launching our Weblog. "Indeed," he adds, "our biggest problem was letting people know what a Weblog was."

Colin Tough, former editor-in-chief of IPC Media's new media department, and currently editor of WebUser, believes that Europe, and Britain in particular, have taken advantage of being late comers to the Internet, because local companies benefited from American experiences.

"A lot of the mistakes were already been made in America," he says. "It is as if we already had a prototype to work from, yet we still had first mover advantage in Europe. It saved us the costs and the difficulties of building something from scratch"

Coming later to the market also meant that European publishers had the chance to assess the threat to revenues posed by independent start-up companies. This enabled them to guide online editorial developments, rather than react to existing competitive pressures.

"Traditional players are learning what online is all about while start-ups are withering away," says Tough. "The dinosaurs are beginning to evolve. They have learned that what makes you successful on the Web is taking the expertise you have in print and use it online. What you must transfer to the Web is skills and knowledge "not content. This is something that a lot of publishers, in America as well as in Europe, found difficult to understand. But we had the American example to learn from."

Although no threat from start-up publishers really materialised in Europe, competition among print publishers remains strong at national level, and the Web has become one of the arenas in which the battle for the audience is fought.

"Fierce competition among national newspapers "and the fact that news-stand sales are so important in Europe "helps stimulate online developments. For example, when The Daily Telegraph went online The Times had to be up there too. And if The Times was on the Web, the Guardian had to go online "and do it better," says Tough.

In Italy, the situation is very much the same, according to Vittorio Zucconi, the editor of the online edition of Italy's newspaper La Repubblica, who is also American correspondent for the print edition.

"Print media in America can afford to be arrogant while we are forced to be humbler," he says, "American newspapers have local dominance and have no real need for an Internet edition. In Italy, every newspaper tries to compete on a national level, so there is always the push to launch something with a bigger scope."

Looking specifically at the southern European market, Zucconi also believes that Italian and Spanish newspapers embraced the opportunities opened up by online journalism because they needed to free themselves from the pressures of the great industrial and political powers which influence print media in those countries.

"Journalists saw the Internet as the way to escape this conditioning," he says. "We must remember that, in Italy, online initiatives always came from the marginal journalists. Much of Europe's innovative journalism "including my own Il Calcio in Testa [a football Weblog cum forum] "is done on an unpaid, voluntary basis. This kind of 'New Frontier volunteering' cannot be found in American corporate media."

The role of individual innovators is crucially important in British newsrooms too. "A handful of individuals pushed things forward as far as online developments were concerned," agrees Tough. "The attitude of most companies was: 'he is not daft, we'll give him a little money and see whether what he does covers ourselves for the future?"

American publishers may find that there is something to learn from the European experience: Use the Web to develop a rapport with your audience. Whether through Weblogs, direct dialogues between journalists and the public or other initiatives, European publications have been extremely successful at deepening the relationship with their readers through Web journalism.

Indeed, a common complaint among European journalists these days is that technological setbacks prevent them from introducing more innovations. "An online specific journalism has not developed yet. Technical constraints severely limit the opportunities available to journalists: video usage, for example, is hindered by slow connections," says Zucconi. "The truth is, the Internet is an extraordinary medium. We just have to learn how to use it."