Whatever the medium—newspapers, books, or magazines—many Netfolks saw the Internet as a path to diversity. That was partly why I liked seeing The News & Observer online with A. C. Snow et al. Maybe the Internet could rescue locally owned newspapers before they all tumbled down the maws of conglomerates. On May 17, 1995, however, The NandO Times, the Webbed newspaper of the N & O, ran a story that I’d never wanted to read. A chain was buying up the company. For perhaps the first time, a Net daily reported on the sale of it and its pulped-wood siblings.

A color photo showed Frank Daniels III briefing his staff. What really caught my eye, however, was a revelation that I saw later in the New York Times: “Frank Daniels III said he was convinced that the paper needed to find a larger parent in part to give the paper the resources necessary to nurture those new electronic efforts.” More than a few of us newspaper junkies had hoped that the new technology would help keep the N & O local. I recalled one reason why Daniels had not dumped his N & O stock in the 1980s in favor of an investment in an online service. “The relationship between a newspaper and a community,” he had said, “has such a richness and history that communities shouldn’t lose that.” Now, however, after 101 years in the Daniels family, the N & O and trimmings were going to a California chain for $373 million. The buyer was McClatchy Newspapers Inc., the former employer of George Schlukbier, the Daniels’s new-media guru.

No wicked corporate conspiracies existed here. The Danielses simply felt comfortable with McClatchy, which not only shared the N & O’s still basically liberal politics but also enjoyed a good reputation in the newspaper business.

Run out of Sacramento, McClatchy Newspapers was a family-owned chain with just twelve dailies. It allowed much more leeway to local editors than many others did, and I might well have reacted just as the Daniels family did when the McClatchy people came calling. The N & O mustn’t end up in the hands of some skinflint chain; McClatchy Newspapers could be an excellent alternative.

Still, the sale did not delight me. The Net, after all, was supposed to be good for small guys, including, presumably, family-owned enterprises. Josephus Daniels had bought the N & O at that bankruptcy auction in 1894, seen it through the Roaring Twenties, the stockmarket crash, and the heyday of his friend FDR. He must have died thinking that the Daniels name would forever grace the masthead. From a portrait in the boardroom, he looked out at his progeny announcing the transaction. Just why couldn’t all the computers and cables and videocams have helped strengthen the family business, not force its sale?

I could see how the latter may have happened. The Daniels had had to invest in both the printing press and the new media, with an emphasis on the plural. A story on newsprint, an Internet audio, and a video would cost more than just an old-fashioned version. Network-related expenses of the N & O may have been smaller than the investment in new press, but they would only grow in the future. No-frills Web areas cost next to nothing to set up. But net.papers with the very flashiest graphics and full-motion video would need programmers and designers and other specialists, not all of them cheap. At the same time the Daniels wanted to cover their circulation area well, and that meant a big, expensive staff of reporters, too.

Just as important, however, the N & O faced strong competition for advertisers and readers. Yes, the Net shrank distances and gave smaller companies some new marketing opportunities. But as shown by Time Warner’s giant electronic newsstand, it could also create some good synergies for media conglomerates offering package deals to national advertisers. In certain respects—hardly all—readers also benefited. I could key in “Carly Simon,” for example, and see any stories that might have appeared about her, not only in Time but also in Entertainment Weekly or People. Frank Daniels could bring together wire service news and offbeat items from technical publications and others. But in the future he couldn’t match the brand appeal of corporations such as Time Warner.

Daniels had a right to be proud of his technological accomplishments, of course. But from now on, assuming that he stayed, as he apparently would for the moment, he would be an employee rather than a member of the owning family. Forget the Third Wave talk of Net saving us all from conglomerates. We could all have our own home pages on the World Wide Web, of course, and maybe put out little magazines; and IUMA-style startups could always use the new technology to startle the Goliaths—and in the end, exceptions notwithstanding, the Internet did foster diversity. Clearly, though, it was far from an all-purpose savior for the N & Os of the world. However powerful in North Carolina, the Raleigh newspaper was hardly on an equal footing when it competed against the very largest media organizations.

As if to underscore that point, eight huge newspaper publishers had banded together earlier that spring to form New Century Network, a club for the big boys on the Net. Some people wondered if the giants might lose out in the end—readers wanted to tour the Web themselves, not just confine themselves to material favored by newspaper coalitions. And maybe New Century wouldn’t end up so exclusive after all. Also, advertisers might prefer to sprinkle their cash around the Web rather than focus it on newspaper chains—they could pay for links to their pages from many sites without much ado. The natural economies of the Net might yet win out over the business plans of the giants. Still, for the moment, publishers such as Gannett and the Washington Post Company were apparently setting the tone of New Century itself. The 185 New Century papers claimed more than 23 million paying readers.

“New Century might raise antitrust questions,” wrote Rory O’Connor, a reporter for the San Jose Mercury News, part of Knight-Ridder, a chain in New Century. Peter Winter, interim chief executive of New Century, said the publishers were “comfortable with our conformance to antitrust statutes.”^[4.31]

Antitrust was the talk of the newspaper and online industries. In early June the U.S. Justice Department said it was studying the network that Microsoft aimed to launch in August. Just by clicking on the proper icon available through the Windows 95 operating system, people could join the Microsoft Network. And some newspapers and other online services feared that Microsoft could stifle the competition. In a year Windows might sell 20-40 million copies; what if several million users clicked?

Newspapers worried increasingly about the Microsoft Network and other online services. American Opinion Research of Princeton, N.J., found that almost a fifth of the surveyed editors and publishers thought they might lose more advertising to online services than to television. Nearly three-quarters said the business was in good shape now. Just a half felt the same would be true by the year 2005.^[4.32]

The newspaper chains tried to fight back. Large papers now owned 11 percent of the shares in Netscape Communications, the wizards behind the fastest and best browser on the Web. For the moment things seemed fine for the public. Netscape came up with new wrinkles that other companies didn’t offer, such as the ability for Web pages to sprout color backgrounds without much fuss. But so far it was working with standards-setting bodies rather than saying, “Hey, you guys, these features will be mine alone.” I just hoped that in the future Netscape wouldn’t fashion its software to bind people to specific sources of news from conglomerates such as Knight-Ridder. Perhaps half the people cruising the Web were now using Netscape.

In a buying spree of its own, America Online purchased Internet fixtures such as WAIS Inc., the software company. WAIS had made some of the best publishing tools on the Net. America Online also bought the WebCrawler, a first-rate index to the Web. The company acquired Global Net Navigator, too, the wonderfully Netcentric magazine from O’Reilly and Associates, a guardian of Net culture. Just like Frank Daniels III, Tim O’Reilly alluded to the cost of online services. Explaining the sale, he told a GNN mailing list that “in order to really do justice to the information problem GNN was created to solve, GNN would have to be scaled up beyond our ability to fund it on our own. With many large players entering the Internet information services market, the best way to keep our lead was to team up with one of them.”

The most dramatic—and, some critics might say, ominous—alliance may have happened when MCI teamed up with Rupert Murdoch to form a new partnership that could offer many kinds of material on the Net. It committed as much as $2 billion toward his News Corporation.

MCI wasn’t just eager to be a pipeline for publishers and others—it wanted to Originate Content. The phone company was already publishing readers’ short stories electronically by way of Gramercy Press. Soon it would release a trade paperback—yes, a book on pulped wood—from a novelist writing under the name of a fictitious Gramercy author. But the Murdoch alliance meant so much more. This global entrepreneur controlled Harper-Collins through News Corps. Would his electronic books enjoy global distribution advantages via MCI’s pipelines, compared to offerings from smaller, less connected publishers?

Within the book business itself, the movement toward the Net was accelerating as summer 1995 neared. More and more authors were online, getting feedback from fans—just as the fledglingfledgling rockers of IUMA did. It was a great morale booster, but only to a point. The novelist Nicholson Baker, author of the New Yorker article on electronic library catalogues, complained that e-mail had “the problem of promptitude. You have to answer within four days or you’re being rude. I like the stateliness of paper, where you can take six months. You’re still being unforgivably rude, but somehow it’s okay because other people have been rude in this way before.”^[4.33] Obscure writers, however, found the fan mail from the Internet to be more helpful. In that way the Net was a friend of diversity.

Smaller publishers were also growing more comfortable with the Internet. Bookport, a California-based service, let them post their books on the World Wide Web for Netfolks to read page by page. Alas, a customer could not obtain a whole e-book at once. The idea, of course, was to discourage piracy. I disliked the idea of pay-per-read prevailing; the library model would make books much more popular among the young and actually help good publishers. But the Bookport was well done with oodles of great links to book-related sites on the Web. One of the first titles was Netiquette, a guide to manners on the Internet; that was in the community-minded spirit of the traditional Net.

Larger publishers, too, pushed ahead on the Web. Time Warner was selling “Quick Reads.” It was a series of reference books, self-help guides, and others that you could download in full and search for, say, the right quote from a famous business executive (Bartlett’s Book of Business Quotations) or the appropriate recipe (the Cooking Library). I could understand Time Warner’s fondness here for reference books. Most readers didn’t want to gawk at electronic novels hour after hour. The big question, in cases of tech-savvy conglomerates like Time Warner, was not whether the publishers were ready. It was whether the public was; whether enough people would end up soon enough with the proper hardware for reading books in bed or on the sofa.

That, of course, was where TeleRead came in. Whatever their sizes, publishers needed to hook the nonelite in this videocentric era before they gave up on the written word.

The above is not to suggest that text is the only way to communicate knowledge over the Net. The right graphics certainly can as well. One of the most intriguing examples of the potential here is a remarkable endeavor—the Visible Human Project—in which, so to speak, a murder lives on forever in cyberspace to the benefit of medical education and cancer research. I’ll discuss this in the next chapter.