So I spent last week in our nation's capital, attending a conference of the American Society of Newspaper Editors. I was invited to show CRAYON to the editors of newspapers around the country. In effect to show them that on the web, a 20 year-old Wirehead could create something that could compete with big publishing companies. I was there to scare them.
I did scare some of them, I think, especially the 70-year-old editors who had never seen a mouse that didn't send people standing on top of chairs. But some of them had been scared already, enough to throw some money into their own online service. Some of them were even invited to show off their own rickety newborn sites. They quickly pointed at the one more technical gizmo they had working than the next guy.
But it's not for the technical gizmos that these online newspapers are created. After all, publishers are not Wireheads. They stumble almost blindly into online publishing (or "new media" as they like to call it) to try to understand it and survive. They invest in new media much for the same reason that people demand stock in a two-year old company called Yahoo! to make it worth $1 billion; they fear the future.
It's something like the last Indiana Jones movie, without the soundtrack and explosions. These publishers go off on adventures in new media, scared about making mistakes, but more fearful that they will stagnate and die if they don't.
To reach their goal, they must be penitent to please their readers and make them want to use a new service in a new medium. They must use all their technical knowledge to pull it off. They take each step hoping that the floor won't fall apart beneath them, but the more money and weight they put into each step, the greater the chances that if they fall, they will take their other media empires with them. They must have faith that the technology won't die and let them fall into a pit of wasted time, money and energy.
If they pass all these tests, the goal is the same as in the movie-to find the holy grail (of online publishing). It means everlasting life for their publications and their profits.
No one has found the holy grail of digital publishing yet, but they're trying to find treasure in a couple places. Most have ads on their sites. Others charge for access. But on a network that was founded on the free exchange of information, it's hard to charge someone for the same information they could get for free elsewhere on the web.
The most common question they asked me was "how does CRAYON make money?" They looked frustrated when I told them "it generates some revenue from advertising, but not much. We didn't start it to make money."
The generally accepted good direction is towards building digital cities like The Boston Globe's Boston.com. Newspapers extend their role as the center for community information by utilizing the interactivity of the web to add more services. For example, a digital city would have classified listings, community news, weather, and local news online with forums to discuss and interact with each. It's a simple idea, but it's working.
What they don't seem to get is that no matter how much content they put online, the can't have all of it. The power of the web is its ability to link to other pages of information. While you can't have all the content, you can give readers a good start and then be the gateway to everything else.
In the unsure and sometimes adventurous world of online publishing, one thing remains for sure: most online publishers aren't Wireheads, but they're working on it.