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 rothman@clark.net. 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. MostMost 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:

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:

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.

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 weeksweeks 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.