A Late, Impressive Web Debut
Newsweek's site boasts excellent features, but it's short on interactivity.
By
J.D. Lasica
J.D. Lasica is a former AJR new-media columnist.
NEWSWEEK HAS joined the future.
Newsweek.com arrived on the Web October 4, and unlike the first wave of mainstream media news sites, these folks don't seem to have an identity crisis.
The streamlined site has a spare look, featuring all the content of the print magazine alongside a handful of daily features and breaking news updates. With a 10-person editorial and production staff in New York, and news updating and design help from washingtonpost.newsweek. interactive in Virginia, the Web site has both a modest agenda and realistic goals.
In short, it doesn't pretend to be all things to all Webheads.
"What we've seen with Web news is a rush for everyone to become a wire service," says Michael Rogers, 47, the site's editor and general manager and a former technology editor for the print publication. "As the first blush of enthusiasm over immediacy begins to fade, we think people will find more value in a newsweekly that serves as a smart guide to the Web."
Since the early '90s, Newsweek has had a long run on CD-ROM, Prodigy and America Online, where its staff gained experience in interacting with computer users and dealing with the demands of daily journalism.
Why, then, was it so late in coming to the Web party? Because its parent corporation, the Washington Post Co., considered the Web to be "a more immediate threat" to the Post's classified advertising base than to Newsweek's advertisers, Rogers says.
In the meantime, Rogers had the luxury of watching other Web-based operations evolve. "We learned from watching Time Daily's updates that it's hard for newsweekly writers to do breaking news," Rogers says. Now, for much of that news, Time Daily relies on Reuters.
Like Time, Newsweek has come flat up against a tough question: What is the role of a newsweekly on the Web, a medium in which info junkies seek a minute-by-minute news fix?
"The most important decision a Web publication faces is: `What's your frequency?' " Rogers says. Newsweek.com decided on three:
Breaking news pulled from the Washington Post and the wire services;
Updates five days a week to its Newsmakers, Periscope and Cyberscope columns;
A weekly update that incorporates all the content of the print magazine but also adds links and multimedia components.
Rogers rightly recognizes the different kinds of audiences on the Web. "We see two kinds of behaviors: the surfers who swoop in at lunchtime, read 200 words, and then get out; and we see diggers, who burrow in and just keep following links."
For the burrowers, Newsweek takes the print magazine's articles, which can run to several thousand words, and adds links that give the pieces context.
A popular feature on the site is the photo gallery, which includes sound clips of Newsweek photographers discussing their photos or some aspect of photojournalism. Other good uses of sound files include an art critic narrating an art exhibit, and Newsweek writers and subjects discussing newsworthy topics.
To my mind, newsweeklies can have an overedited quality that wrings the richness out of the writing. But Rogers seems to recognize the need for a different approach. "A more personal voice really seems to work well on the Web. We'll be pushing that further and further into letting writers use first person," he says.
Newsweek.com gets points for integrating its print and online operations. The online staff shares a floor with print staffers in Manhattan, and Peter McGrath, Newsweek's editor of new media, acts as a link between the offices.
But it gets points off for its lack of interactivity. Reader forums are nowhere to be found, though Rogers says that could change once decent bulletin board software is created for the Web.
Similarly, readers have no way of contacting popular columnists such as Jonathan Alter, Jane Bryant Quinn or George Will. Rogers says he'll probably let each columnist decide whether to include his or her own e-mail address.
Rogers doesn't look to Newsweek's print rivals-- U.S. News & World Report and Time--as its main competition online in the long run. "I'm looking at CNN, MSNBC and USA Today and thinking about what they do well and poorly."
How does Rogers view the online landscape a few years out? "I think we'll look back at this as the golden age of the Web, not because everything was exceptionally good but because it was free. There will probably be a tremendous war of attrition in the next two to three years, because we've built too much premium content that we can't support."
If that shakeout occurs, it's unlikely Newsweek.com will be an early casualty.###
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