News You Can Choose   

Television networks are staking out their turf in cyberspace. It's a brave new world where viewers, not producers, decide what goes into the customized "newscasts."

On a typical weekday afternoon, Allison Davis, a former producer for NBC's "Today," is leading a tiny band of cyber-journalists who are bringing NBC News into the online world.

In cramped quarters strewn with computer cables and phone lines, they are preparing stories on Bosnia and Medicare, coaxing an NBC correspondent to write an analysis of Time Warner's merger with Turner Broadcasting, and selecting audio clips and still pictures from a Katie Couric interview with House Speaker Newt Gingrich.

Within hours, the stories, pictures and clips will be uploaded into the vast storehouse of information that is already available from NBC News on Supernet, a part of the new Microsoft Network (MSN) online service.

What can you find there? A detailed history of the conflict in the Balkans, a list of the most damaging hurricanes of the 20th century, a sound clip of O.J. Simpson's explanation of why he didn't testify in his own defense, a guide to the 1996 presidential campaign, excerpts from the latest NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll, transcripts of last week's "Meet the Press" and last night's "Dateline NBC," local weather forecasts, maps of the world, and bios and photos of, among others, Bill Clinton, Bob Dole, Maria Shriver and Willard Scott.

What can't you find? This afternoon Davis is struggling to check the latest headlines from NBC and the Associated Press. They're buried in her hard drive somewhere, but she can't manage to retrieve them. "Something's wrong with my computer, not the system," she explains. Still, she's the executive in charge – if her computer can't get along with Microsoft, what hope is there for the rest of us?

That, in a nutshell, is what network news online looks like these days. There's lots of excitement, enormous potential, plenty of promises and, to put it kindly, erratic delivery.

To take another example, CNN recently opened a site on the World Wide Web that provides an overview of the day's news, again with pictures, sound clips and video as well as text. What's more, unlike NBC's joint venture with Microsoft, CNN's Web site is open at no cost to any computer user with a link to the Internet. But frustration awaits subscribers to America Online, the nation's most popular commercial online service, who want to get their online news from CNN. Some AOL members say their screens freeze because CNN's software isn't compatible with AOL's Web browser. Says one AOLer: "You can't get there from here."

If that sounds confusing, well, it is. The online world is the new frontier of journalism, and veteran television news producers like NBC's Davis, Scott Woelfel of CNN and Les Blatt of ABC News are charting unmarked, ever-changing territory.

Adam Schoenfeld, an online analyst with Jupiter Communications, a New York consulting and publishing firm, says, "All the major news organizations know there's something there online, but they don't know what it is yet. They're feeling their way along."

But Schoenfeld believes there is a growing market for online news that is bound to be filled by the networks or newspapers or wire services. "People don't have a TV set at work, but they have a computer," he says. "If they want real-time news, it's a natural. You can get stories from the AP and Reuters midday today that won't hit your driveway until tomorrow morning."

The network news business should mesh neatly with the online world – the networks, after all, have as much access as anyone to the raw materials of news, the words, pictures, sound and video that can all be delivered online. They also have valuable brand names and the power to promote their online projects.

But to deftly manage the transition from television to online, the networks will have to radically rethink their ideas about how news is packaged and delivered. For starters, online news is viewer-driven, not producer-driven. It's part of a broad social trend that is offering people more choices than ever about how, when and where to get information.

"Essentially, when TV was created, the only power the viewers had was to turn on the set, change the channel and turn the volume up or down," says Dan Werner, vice president of MacNeil/Lehrer Productions, which is about to take PBS' "MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour" online. "Now the people at home are gaining almost as much power as the creators. Now they can see a story on the air or on their computer screen and say, 'Hey, that was interesting, I'd like to learn more about that.' Online gives people the opportunity to go deeper, to make connections."

Or, as ABC's Blatt puts it: "We're quickly coming up on a time when people are going to be able to turn on their computers and basically punch up their own newscasts."

If nothing else, what the networks are doing online provides a peek into the future of television news, when viewers will turn on their sets and face a menu of choices: world news, national stories, local happenings, weather, sports, business or entertainment. With a flick of the remote they'll scan the headlines, skip stories that bore them, seek out more depth or watch highlights of only the sports events they want to see. News you can choose it's been called, and it's a business all the networks would like to be in, someday.

"There's no doubt that, at some point, you're going to go home at night and face a menu of items," says Michael Wheeler, president of NBC Desktop Video, a new venture that delivers business news to computers. "One choice might be the nightly news. Or you could say, 'I want to see news about O.J., an update on the Detroit Tigers and an update on the stock market.' "

Tomorrow's glitzy future is, however, a long way from today's glitchy online world. For now, getting the news online can be maddening, even for a patient and fairly knowledgeable computer user with good equipment. (To research this story, I used an IBM-compatible PC with a Pentium chip and a 14.4 modem, connecting to the Internet through America Online and Prodigy. Even so, surfing the 'Net was rarely smooth sailing.) What's more, once users get plugged into ABC, NBC or CNN online – CBS News has only a minimal presence in cyberspace – it's no simple task to find what you are seeking.

More important, at least from the industry standpoint, no one knows yet whether the networks can make money by delivering news online. Jon Petrovich, a CNN executive who oversees interactive ventures, says, "There will be a business there. How big it will be, I don't know." It's too early even to predict whether news online will be supported by advertising sales, subscription fees or both.

Keeping all those caveats in mind, it's still easy to see why television executives are excited by the online world. Here's where each network now stands:

• CNN launched an ambitious service at the end of August on the World Wide Web, a part of the Internet that can be accessed through any of the commercial online services. CNN also retains a smaller presence on CompuServe.

The advantage of being on the Web is its reach. In the long run, CNN should be able to attract more traffic and generate more advertising revenues than rivals who are tied to one of the online services.

The downside is that CNN must bear all the costs of creating and maintaining its site. The network has sold ads to several sponsors, but revenues are negligible. And the costs are substantial, because most of the technical work is done in-house and a staff of 45 full time employees has been assigned to CNN Online. They update the Web site round the clock, seven days a week.

"If you look at the other broadcast networks, I don't think there's any doubt that we're ahead of what they're doing," says Woelfel, editor in chief of CNN Interactive, a division of CNN Online. CNN's online effort stands out for its breadth of coverage, with areas devoted to world and national news, sports, entertainment, business, food, health and weather.

For the all-news cable network, the stakes are high: An obvious appeal of news online is that it can be accessed at any time. Already, computer users who want information about a fast-breaking story have two choices – they can go online or turn on CNN.

Woelfel says that if he does his job right, many news junkies may prefer CNN Interactive to cable. "Online, you can get the news at any instant, when you choose to browse it," he says. "On television, you may watch an hour of news and never see the story you want."

CNN makes finding a story online even easier by providing a search function. Users can plug in keywords, and the system will search its library for whatever stories have been produced about, say, Bosnia or the Unabomber. Neither ABC nor NBC offers a search function yet.

• NBC News made its online debut with the launch of Windows 95 and the Microsoft Network in August. The Microsoft connection is both the strength and weakness of NBC's venture.

On the plus side, NBC's exclusive deal with Microsoft made the network a lot of money up front, better than $4 million, executives say. Essentially, the software company underwrote all of NBC's costs of going online.

Microsoft also enjoys some technical advantages over the other online services that enabled NBC to immediately provide a graphically appealing site with lots of multimedia content. More than the other networks, NBC exploits the richness of the online medium by including hypertext links – highlighted words and images that, with a mouse click, lead to additional information or related topics. "People have likened this to a mini CD-ROM," says Davis. "You can do so much to add perspective and depth to the news."

But NBC has dramatically limited its reach by dealing solely with Microsoft, which projects only one million subscribers by next summer. Most experts think MSN will grow rapidly, but the World Wide Web can already be reached by an estimated 9.7 million computer users.

What's more, despite Microsoft's largesse, NBC News is going online with fewer than a dozen staffers. Davis and her staff are covering four stories a day – fewer than the "Nightly News" – and their coverage is mostly repackaging of material created elsewhere, in addition to providing background materials, transcripts and other more in-depth information. There's nothing wrong with that, but Davis would like to do more original reporting.

"We're ambitious, but tired," she says.

• ABC News became the first network news division to enter cyberspace in a major way when it launched ABC News on Demand with America Online in October 1994. A year later, ABC finds itself slipping behind its competitors, a sign of the breakneck pace of change.

As a result, ABC is planning to relaunch its online project this fall. "This medium changes so fast that you have to reinvent it every six to 12 months," says Bill Abrams, a former Wall Street Journal reporter who is vice president for business development at the news division. "It's just an endless game of hopscotch."

None of the networks will discuss their budgets for online news, but ABC News appears to be spending less than CNN or NBC, with just four full time editorial employees. ABC's deal with America Online gives the network a share of the hourly fees paid to AOL by users when they are in ABC's areas.

As an information provider, ABC News online isn't very impressive. Its breaking news coverage, which is limited to very brief wire reports from Reuters, can't compare to CNN's or, for that matter, to the AP wire, which is also available online. Nor has ABC organized its background material as well as NBC, which offers greater depth on news topics.

But ABC's online area on AOL has something neither NBC nor CNN can claim – an active community of users who keep coming back, not to read the latest headlines, but to interact with each other, on bulletin boards and during live "chat" sessions.

This is a key to success online, say ABC executives. "I want the user to react," says Abrams. "We have to focus on stories that people talk about, a story that leads you to do something else, whether that's to download video or go to a chat room or a message board."

The popular bulletin boards offered on ABC News online draw daily comments from users. Many are trite or inane – "I think it is time for Sam [Donaldson] to get a toupee with a little grey in it" – but some offer thoughtful or heartfelt observations about issues in the news and ABC's coverage. "Nightline" town meetings about right-wing militias and about teen sex, for example, set off lively online debates that continued long after Ted Koppel left the air.

Live online chats with ABC anchors and correspondents have also drawn crowds, and occasional controversy as well. One night last spring, ABC's "Day One" correspondent John Hockenberry described capitalism as "amoral" and President Clinton as "a crowd-pleasing fanatic trying to look like a Republican." When asked if he thought the Contract with America would work, Hockenberry replied tartly: "Yes... I'm moving to Switzerland."

Said Abrams: "He went a little too far in terms of what we like ABC News correspondents to say or not say." Conservative media critics circulated Hockenberry's comments.

All the networks say they would like to take fuller advantage of the interactive capability of the online world. NBC's Davis and CNN's Woelfel say they plan to send "cyber-journalists" equipped with laptop computers to major events, such as the 1996 political conventions. There they will seek to hook up newsmakers with computer users for live question-and-answer sessions.

Had CNN Interactive covered the Oklahoma City bombing, Woelfel says, he would have brought rescue workers or police online. "You run over to them with a laptop, and say, 'Would you mind answering some questions from our online users?' That gives a real c7nnection between users and the people on the scene."

Perhaps so, but the networks may find they're neither needed, nor welcomed, as intermediaries. Typically, when major news stories break, online users create their own connections. During the Los Angeles earthquake and riots, for example, city residents provided firsthand accounts of events on all the online services. And a perennial online topic is how the mass media get stories wrong.

In a new study called "Tabloids, Talk Radio and the Future of News," Ellen Hume, a senior fellow at the Annenberg Washington Program, argues that online news challenges traditional journalists to get their house in order, or be bypassed. "Citizens can program their computers to retrieve their own 'news,' assembled easily from original sources far more diverse than the journalist's official Rolodex," she writes. "Newly empowered, they also can second-guess what professional journalists produce."

Indeed, the influence that the networks ordinarily wield may not be assets in cyberspace. "The early [users] seem to like to thumb their noses at the mass-market news providers," says Peter Krasilovsky, an analyst with Arlen Communications in Bethesda, Maryland.

Moreover, the differences between television news and print blur online. The networks must compete with magazines, newspapers and specialty publications, many of which have big cyberspace plans. Time Warner, for example, has created a site on the World ýide Web called Pathfinder that draws upon all of Time's publications to deliver more varied content than any of the networks are offering. Hours after the Unabomber's 35,000-word tract was printed in the Washington Post, for example, it was available online at Pathfinder.

While network executives focus on how to develop online news as a business, social critics and traditional journalists worry about the social implications of delivering news on demand. Interactive news, for all its dazzling promise, could widen the gap between the information-rich and the information-poor and erode the sense of community and shared knowledge now provided by over-the-air television.

"The consequence of all this fragmentation is that mainstream news organizations are being perceived as less and less relevant," says Andrew Kohut, a pollster and media critic. "The downside of all this, from a civic point of view, is disengagement. In t»e 1960s, when the American public watched Walter Cronkite..a lot of information got force fed. The public knows less about what's going on in the larger world than it did in those days."

In a speech last year, ABC News anchor Ted Koppel worried out loud about the dangers of news you can choose, whether delivered online or through pay television. "The wealthiest, the best off, will have more: more choice, more access, more control," he said. "Those that have the least will continue to have the least."

Evidence suggests he's right. Today's early experiments with interactive news target affluent viewers. NBC Desktop Video, for example, provides live television coverage of business news, delivered to the computers of Wall Street traders, mutual fund managers and corporate executives. It's a kind of C-SPAN for business, covering corporate news conferences, congressional testimony that affects the markets, presentations to securities analysts and interviews with CEOs.

When AT&T split up, NBC Desktop Video covered the entire news conference by the company's CEO, Robert Allen. "The wire story moved, but our customers want to hear Allen explain his vision," says Michael Wheeler, the president of Desktop Video. "If I'm MCI or Sprint, I don't want to depend on a third party to interpret the nuances that matter to me."

Wheeler believes that niche programming like Desktop Video will eventually migrate from offices to the home. "Every technological innovation has moved from business to the home, from the lightbulb to the fax machine," he says. "Some people will always get their news in a linear fashion. But others are going to pull up what they want to see, when they want to see it."

ABC's Blatt agrees. "It's no longer a case of people sitting there and watching the evening newscast and saying, 'That's the way it is.' "