Online Publishing:
The Past, Present, and Future of Electronic Distribution
Note: This paper is hideously out-of-date. The sites listed here are before the web exploded all over the place, so reading this is about the equivalent of reading a 1912 Ford manual to try to figure out how to fix your '86 Saab. If at all useful, this paper shows the tremedous growth of online publishing web from its humble beginnings on college campuses.
Two months ago, I thought it would be fun to compile a list of free news sources on the Internet. I used the perl programming language to it to make it interactive and called it CRAYON for CReAte Your Own Newspaper. As of today, 35,000 newspapers have been created with CRAYON and hundreds of thousands of accesses have been made to its pages. I now realize that online news is big.
It has the potential to change all of our lives. Customized news services can provide information personalized to the individual. Internet publications have the immediacy of radio and TV, the depth of print media, and interactive capabilities that the world has never seen before in any type of media.
With these advantages, traditional print newspapers are rushing to claim their space online, most providing some part of their print publication online and some basic information about their (print) publication. Few have taken advantages of the interactive capabilites of the media. Only a select number, like HotWired, the online service of Wired magazine, have touched the possibilities of the media.
The future of online publishing is a path that has never been explored. Will readers demand more entertaining forms of news? How will publishers adapt to the technology to provide visually appealing online publications? How can profit be generated from these services? How will copyright law complicate it all? The answers to some of these questions may be found in the past of online publishing.
In most forms of research, the best way to predict the future is to look into the past. Unfortunately, the history of online publishing is extremely brief.
The major online services such as America Online (AOL), Prodigy, and CompuServe. have had online news services since they have existed. Typically, a traditional print publication will pay to go online on an service. Their look and feel is constrained by the features of the service's software. The Internet provides these services for a much larger audience. While AOL is struggling to handle its 2.5 million users, the Internet is already connected to 25 million people in remote locations around the world and at speeds magnitudes faster than what AOL can presently handle.
Marc Andreessen, Mosaic creator and current Internet guru at Netscape Communications, recently told a graduate class at Stanford that if these services don't adopt an Internet infrastructure, they will soon be in trouble. All of these services are rapidly developing gateways to the Internet. Prodigy even recently scrapped their propietary client software to switch to a web browser.
Before even most online services were big, ClariNet Communications was delivering commercial newspapers via the Internet. They offered a service where by one could read the text of USA Today, The New York Times, and The Washington Post via USENET news or via gopher. These formats had no pictures or attractive layouts, but all the text of the papers' articles were there. The service was incredibly expensive, especially for large sites (like universities), and has since been discontinued.
College newspapers have dominated the Internet publishing scene so far. This has happenned for several reasons. First, college students have the know-how to make it work. Second, they have the resources such as high-powered computers and high-speed Internet connections already installed at their schools. Third, they are less worried about copyright and profit issues. Since most college newspapers are distributed freely, there is no loss in providing a newspaper freely on the Internet. Even if a newspaper charges for on-campus delivery, most of the readers of the online version are from areas of world beyond their readership base.
At The Bucknellian, many of the online readers are alumni or other people who are just browsing. The online version of The Bucknellian has allowed us to keep in contact with these alumni who frequently send comments and letters about the paper. The back issues provide a useful source for research. Few people will keep a stack of old Bucknellian issues around, but searching it on the web is easy and convenient. Displaced members of the Bucknell community such as students who spend a semester abroad and professors on sabbatical have complimented us on how easy it was to keep up with news back at Bucknell. Even if they choose to subscribe to the paper edition via postal mail, the electronic edition will be ready to read days before the print edition arrives on their doorstep.
The Bucknellian was one of the first consistent online college newspapers, with its first edition online in Nov. 1993.
Quite a few college newspapers have followed and come online, many with the help of The Tech and The Bucknellian's HTML converter software. The Kansas State University student newspaper, The Collegian wrote their own batch converter, WebPress. The Scarlet at Clark University wrote their own as well, PageMaker Websuck.
Half of the WWW is devoted to creating information and services. The other half is devoted to organizing all the information in some logical way. Several lists of college newspapers exist, the most thorough of which is maintained by Kelly Campbell at KSU.
Many more print publications are online as well such as The San Francisco Examiner and The New York Times which publishes the first eight pages of its paper in PDF format. At this time, most of these papers are extremely underdeveloped and not always completely functional or updated consistently. According to Editor & Publisher's mediainfo Interactive page, 34 newspapers are currently working on online services including The Boston Globe and The Baltimore Sun.
Right now, there are a lot of newspapers out there, but few, with the exceptions of The Nando Times and The Mercury Center, few are doing much else than simply making their paper readable in a new form.
One of the major technological obstacles online newspaper are trying to overcome is the problem of converting their print publication to HTML for the web. Most publishers use popular pagination software such as Adobe PageMaker or Quark XPress for their print layouts, so naturally, the easiest solution would be to simply convert documents from those programs to HTML. Unfortunately, this proves very difficult.
The problem arises that desktop publishing applications like Adobe PageMaker and Quark XPress have been around much longer than HTML has. PageMaker made its debut shortly after the Macintosh computer was introduced in 1984. HTML has only had two years to develop. HTML 2.0 is not even finished being formally specified and the 3rd specification (HTML 3.0), allowing the use of tables and many special characters previously not available is being explored now.
With this obvious generation gap between technologies, one would expect that HTML is much more simple than a pagination program. PageMaker and XPress give designers complete control over the placement of text and pictures and is focused on producing high-quality printer output. HTML is designed mainly to be viewed on a monitor, and never be printed at all, although most browsers have simple print capabilities. The ideal converter would maintain the look of a document and would convert an entire page automatically, adding hypertext links where appropriate.
The first solution to this problem was to preempt the desktop publishing application and use a common text formatting format, the Rich Text Format (RTF) which could be easily translated to HTML with a small program. Rtftohtml is still very popular for translating individual documents.
One of the first converters to appear for a pagination program was qt2www, written by The Tech, XPress puts on articles when it exports them. The major drawback to this system is that all the articles have to be exported before they can be processed, and any form of a page layout is lost.
For PageMaker, I wrote the first converter, called Dave. It furthers the automation process by allowing users to click on articles in the PageMaker and convert them one at a time.
Using the Internet, The Tech and I publicized our free converters and allowed them to be copied at will. They are now in use all over the world. However, they are not up to commercial quality, especially in providing a layout for each page. Rumors are that commercial converters for PageMaker and XPress are currently in development.
Adobe chose an entirely different route in converting their documents. They chose the Portable Document Format (PDF) and simply 'print' their documents to a file which can be downloaded and viewed by a program external to a web browser. This makes PDF a web publisher's dream- converting to a document that can be distributed via the web is idiot-proof. Unfortunately, it is a web reader's nightmare. Although Adobe distributes the reader software, Acrobat, freely, the standard has hardly caught on among the Internet community. The extra application is an annoyance. While HTML documents are generally small, PDF documents are usually at least 100 Kilobytes and get as large as serveral megabytes. So to read a PDF file, you must first wait for the file to download, while HTML allows you to read the text almost immediately. The document sizes are extremely large in dimensions, mostly because monitors have much smaller resolutions than our eyes. So to read an PDF file, you need to do a lot of scrolling around on the document, even on a large monitor.
With no real winner in the desktop publishing to HTML conversion field, most online publishers are left to using whatever software tools they have and spending a lot of time recreating their layouts in HTML as accurately as they can.
Other than the technical, the next greatest obstacle in bringing news to the Internet is the fear of copyright infringement. Every computer sold today has some kind of 'copy' and 'paste' feature which allows information (specifically text) to be copied at will. Newspapers fear that with such an ability their newspapers will be 'pirated' across the Internet, much like software is today, and their subscriptions will drop.
The good news about copyrights is that anything created in the United States is given copyright as soon as it is created. According to the Copyright FAQ
Copyright protection subsists . . . in original works of authorship fixed in any tangible medium of expression, now known or later developed, from which they can be perceived, reproduced, or otherwise communicated, either directly or with the aid of a machine or device. 17 U.S.C. 102(a). and, A work is "fixed" in a tangible medium of expression when its embodiment in a copy or phonorecord, by or under the authority of the author, is sufficiently permanent or stable to permit it to be perceived, reproduced, or otherwise communicated for a period of more than transitory duration. 17 U.S.C. 101.
All an author has to do to declare his or her copyright is to display "Copyright (year). All rights reserved." Many online newspapers have done just that. The Tech places copyright notices on every article published on their web site. It's like seeing FBI warnings at the beginning of a video tape.
Copyright has been extended not only to text but to whole pages and images as well. Peter Adams, former editor of The Trincoll Journal at Trinity College in Hartford, Conn., places copyright notices on all his pages, including his home page. Adams' persistence no doubt comes after a bout with a The Eagle, another college newspaper. The Eagle admitted to copying The Trincoll Journal's graphic banner, yet refused to change it. Adams managed to get The Eagle to change the graphic after he blasted them in a column in The Trincoll Journal.
Adams expressed his frustration in an email interview, saying "Copyright law needs to be re-understood with regards to on-line technology. The reason I say this is that sure, online documents are copies of the original but those copies are implicitly granted to the reader by the author of the online document."
In other words, a copy of a document served up by a WWW server is not in violation of copyright, while copying that same document from a WWW browser is a violation of copyright restrictions. Situations like this where the courts have not made rulings on legal restrictions of copyright is where newspapers feel they have no protection against illegal reproduction of their work.
One case last year showed what one violation of copyright can do on the Internet. ClariNet offered as one of its services a newsgroup which has copies of all the recent columns by Dave Barry, a popular national columnist. Someone apparently copied one of Barry's columns and posted it on another newsgroup which was then distributed freely worldwide. Barry found out about the illegal positng, and columns were removed from ClariNet forever.
In January of 1995, the Internet was thrown into another controversy when UNISYS said that they would start enforcing the patent on their LZW compression algorithm used in GIFs (Graphics Interchange Format), the most common graphic format on the Internet. The GIF Licensing Controversy ended with UNISYS reversing its decision, but not without scaring everyone who uses them that they could be sued or asked for large amounts of money to pay for their GIFs. Foggy patent restrictions such as this have made publishers cautious of going online.
College newspapers are having different problems going online, especially in regards to online advertising. Most educational institutions get severely discounted rates for their Internet access over commercial sites. For these discounted rates, schools are bound to refrain from any commercial activity including selling products and any type of advertising. Yet, college newspapers rely on advertising for a majority of their revenue. The Tech successfully petitioned MIT allow them to include ads on their server. Many other online college papers are fighting the same battle now, some unsuccessfully.
As mentioned previously, there are more legal complications when wire services are involved in a online publication.
The problems of copyright on the Internet are just starting to be brought to the attention of the courts. It is impossible to say what decisions the courts will make on Internet copyrights, but whatever rulings they make will surely have an affect on how newspapers deliver online.
The Internet has the potential to change the way news is made. Certainly computers have revolutionized the publishing industry, giving newspapers graphics and typesetting capabilities that Internet provides capabilities for communication and gathering of information that is unbeatable in terms of speed, volume, and timeliness. Realizing this, journalists have banded together to help each other find resources on the Internet. One of the most popular is the CARR-L listserv which is for Computer Assisted Reporting/Research. Other similar forums include Journet, NIT (New Information Technologies), Journal-Net (International Journalist Network), and the alt.journalism newsgroup. For student members of media, the STU-MEDIA listserv often has heated discussions on a variety of issues. I have found it to be a useful source while on The Bucknellian staff for perspectives on student journalism from all over the world.
Many of these groups have created pages with frequently changing links to news sources. One of these pages called The Daily News - Free Internet Sources.
Further supporting the student press is The Global Student Newswire (GSN), an organization founded to be the hub of communication among student journalists. While GSN has had some difficulties taking off, the concept is ideal and hopefully will continue. Meanwhile, University Wire has caught on among some Big Ten schools and other colleges around the nation. University Wire is like an Associated Press wire service for college newspapers. Mike Lazerow of Northwestern University who started UWIRE last year, explains how it works to other prospective college newspapers:
"All you would need to do is grant University Wire permission to run your stories. The only effort on your part will be to read through the stories each day and decide if you want to run them.
In exchange for your stories, your paper would have access to dozens of other college papers from around the country each day. The costs, as you see, are minimal. The benefits, endless."
Certain media events have taken place only online. Last summer, the Shoemaker Levy Comet collided with Jupiter, creating spectacular images. The only way to get these images quickly was via the Internet. From July 8, 1994 to Aug. 1 1994, NASA's Shoemaker-Levy page received almost two million accesses. Since then, that number has doubled. The huge number of people trying to receive images of this event brought the Internet to a crawl during the peak of the collisions.
Surprisingly, many reporters do not use the web for their research. I get frequent messages from reporters who are interested in writing stories about CRAYON. They ask me questions like "What's your major?" and "How old are you?" both of which are easily answered on my home page.
On a much smaller scale, this paper was researched entirely using the web. Using hypertext links allowed to easily find relevant information and link it back to its source directly, rather than referring to footnotes. Writing a paper is HTML is an incredible learning experience. The difficulty in citing sources online is that they change so frequently. Literally overnight, Steve Outings' Commercial Online Newspapers Services page became Editor & Publisher's mediainfo Interactive. It's confusing to look at source one day and return the next day to find it completely different. That simply isn't possible when using print media.
If nothing else, the Internet has forged a new path though which producers (publishers) and consumers (readers) can communicate. By keeping in closer contact with their readers, publications can get a better idea of what their readers are most interested in. Many computer magazines like MacUser now receive a majority of their reader feedback via email. Hundreds of newspapers, magazines, TV, and radio stations at least have e-mail addresses. Medialist is an extensive list of these addresses.
Having easy access to media also has its drawbacks, however. Overzealous Internauts frequently blast their unsolicited opinions to hundreds of media outlets with one message. Junk mail is far from unique to the postal system.
The future of online publication lies in exploiting the WWW media in new ways. Readers will demand much more than just simple text for getting their news. Multimedia allows the incorporation of text, sound, graphics, and movies into the news. One college publication that is using these capabilities right now is The Trincoll Journal. Its stunning graphics and layout show the future potential of the media. The Trincoll Journal is unlike most publishers because it has never had a print edition. The web edition evolved from the HyperCard stacks from which it was born. This allows their staff to concentrate on the online publication without the worries of consistency and conversion from a print version.
Hotwired has an interesting service as well. The full issues of Wired are online, including their post-modern and sometimes bizarre layouts. Each article allows readers to comment and discuss at the bottom, all in hypertext format.
Hotwired's interactive services have allowed them to become one of the first online services to include advertisements online. Advertisements take on new meaning online, offering interactivity previously never imagined. Hotwired is expecting to take in $2 million from advertises such as Zima and Silicon Graphics. While not actually a online publication, Riddler holds contests for internauts, hiding clues among online advertisements at their site.
Interactive advertisements and flashy graphics are great attractions for readers, but do little to improve the quality of news. TIME Magazine's daily news summary gives readers a quick summary of the day's news and then allows them to search TIME's back issues for more detailed information on the subject. A search on 'O. J. Simpson' brings up more than 60 articles about the case.
TIME Magazine's daily news summary is the most popular news site with CRAYON, the customized news service which I created two months ago. CRAYON is just one of a variety of applications that all focus on pointcasting. Pointcasting is defined as providing customized news for a specific audience. A company, appropriately called Pointcast, sells a software program that filters news from CompuServe or Prodigy. The software allows you to define your news interests, design a layout for your newspaper, and retrieve it at a specified time. Ensemble Information Systems is developing a similar product called the Relevant Personal Edition which provides a similar service, but Ensemble provides the source for the news via the Internet, pulling articles from The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and others. A version of the Personal Edition is available for publishers as well.
Founded originally as a research network, the Internet was not built with methods of billing in mind. It has been left up to private companies to devise methods of commerce over the network. Newshare is one start-up company that is working to allow users to read all their news online, rather than subscribing to a print publication. Calling themselves a news 'brokerage,' Newshare allows publications to let subscribers of certain online newspaper read that newspaper for a regular subscription fee, and then charges the user 'by the click' if a user wants to read another online newspaper to which he or she does not have a subscription.
The most powerful aspect of the WWW technology is its ability to foster communication across geographical barriers. Internet users in Austria can read about Bucknell's Good Luck John with a single click. Reading news from Russia, Italy, or Peru is as simple as reading your hometown paper online.
The future of online publishing will be very exciting. Multimedia, pointcasting, and interactive services will change the way we read and perceive the news.
If online news continues to grow, the phrase "stop the presses" may become meaningless. There will be no presses to stop. When an error is found in a publication, the reporter could simply fix it. End of story.
Despite these advantages, publications going online believe that online publications will not replace print publications, at least for a while. Print media is still more visually appealing and easier to look at than a monitor. It is also cheaper, although that may change very soon as Internet access prices are driven lower by increased supply.
The most important aspect of this new media is the ability of groups that have typically been just consumers to actually produce content. The WWW allowed two college students from a rural Pennsylvania university to receive national press without leaving their dorm rooms. Newspapers of the future may not write the news, but simply organize existing content for specific audiences. It may happen or newspapers may cling to the traditional gatherer and reporter mode.
All these factors will weigh in soon as competing publishers go online and others try to to catch up. Will this the beginning of a new and better form of media or will it be the VideoTex of the 1990s?
For the future of online newspapers, the ink isn't dry yet.
Literary Freeware. Reproduction with attribution OK.
Copyright © 1995 Jeff Boulter. All rights reserved.