Webward Ho!   

The chance to be a pioneer in an exciting new medium is luring traditional print and broadcast journalists to MSNBC on the Internet.

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TOM BREW LOOKED DOWN the road and didn't like the view. He'd been a mid-level editor at the San Jose Mercury News for 12 years and didn't see much room for dramatic career advancement.

On a whim in the summer of 1995, he sent his resumŽ to Microsoft's new news enterprise in Redmond, Washington, which had already hired some of his Mercury News colleagues. Soon a Microsoft recruiter called. Was Brew interested in an editing job with the Microsoft Network, a job that offered not only a new challenge but also stock options in the company that made founder Bill Gates a billionaire?

"Unlike a lot of people, I still retain a lot of affection for newspapers," says Brew, now 45. "But the last 10 years, I wasn't getting job offers. It was flattering when Microsoft called."

Microsoft flew Brew and his wife, Dawn, up to Redmond and wowed them. That was when the soul-searching truly began. Was he really ready to give up the newspaper business? Was Microsoft really interested in journalism or was this just another way of promoting Windows 95? Was working for Microsoft "selling out"? Would his friends still consider him a journalist? Was he willing to move his wife and two small boys away from his parents and the San Francisco Bay Area to a region where thick, gray skies are as common as blue?

Eventually, the sky-high housing market in the Bay Area helped make the decision easier for the Brews, who moved to Redmond in September 1995. But there was a more compelling reason. "I knew it would be rough making the transition. But I also didn't want to spend the rest of my life as a mid-level editor," Brew says. "They put us in a newsroom and said, 'Don't worry about money.' Who knows how it will work out? But how many times do you have an opportunity to create a new medium?"

Brew made the move at just the right time. Shortly after he got there, Microsoft signed a joint venture agreement with NBC to create MSNBC. The newly formed 24-hour information and talk network married NBC's cable and television expertise with Microsoft's extensive Internet and personal computer software knowledge. Debuting in July 1996, MSNBC enjoys the deep pockets of Microsoft and the credibility and prestige of NBC.

Soon the migration to the Redmond outpost began. But not only high-tech geeks wearing their baseball caps backwards have moved to Redmond. Since the unconventional media marriage, traditional journalists have left secure jobs at such news organizations as the Wall Street Journal, U.S. News & World Report, ABC News, the Associated Press, CBS News and the Los Angeles Times to be part of a forward-looking experiment mixing network TV, cable and the Internet.

Some simply came for the challenge of trying to make something new work. Some made the move because they feared that their industries were stagnating. Others had grown tired of the predictability of their jobs. And many came so they wouldn't miss the boat sailing into journalism's future. "This is like television in 1947," says Merrill Brown, editor in chief of MSNBC on the Internet. "It really is, 'Whoa!' "

ONCE THERE, THE MEDIA pioneers have encountered the snafus that often accompany a start-up: equipment malfunctions, disorganization, biweekly reorganizations, brutally long hours.

Other challenges are not so commonplace. It's easier, for example, to get a hard drive than a reporter's notebook. And rather than providing a familiar newsroom setting, MSNBC is a virtual Tower of Babel with its refugees from the worlds of print, television, radio and computers speaking in their own strikingly different languages.

It's a land where writers are called "content providers" and most journalists find themselves working next to people who think with a different part of the brain, to whom "getting granular" means getting down to specific details.

"I find it easier to talk to the technical people than to understand them," says Brown, who has worked at the Washington Post and Court TV. "The journalists here are often forced to stop and say, 'Wait a minute. Let's switch to English.' "

The pluses, though, are formidable. A chance to find completely new and creative ways to tell stories. Endless space for copy and graphics (witness the 10-part series on the 11th anniversary of the Challenger explosion). The money. For some, stock options. An endless supply of free coffee, sodas and juice. A Starbucks coffee kiosk on site. An architecturally dramatic cafeteria with restaurant quality food (so you won't have to waste time going out for lunch). No suits and ties. And high-caliber people. The only dead wood is in the nearby forest.

The Microsoft compound sprawls across 296 acres with 62 low-slung red buildings and could easily be confused with a college campus. As on many campuses, there are few signs of gray hair or serious wrinkles. It's dominated by the young, peopled with the best and the brightest clad in jeans, T-shirts, cutoffs, sweaters and sandals. Casual is cool. So is long hair on guys. A tie or suit is a dead giveaway that you are either a job supplicant or a visitor with something to sell. Spiffy shuttle buses with baskets of Tootsie Rolls, bubble gum and hard candy whisk employees from one side of campus to the other.

In the midst of the main campus is glass-enclosed Building 25, home to the 200 or so journalists taking a gamble on MSNBC. Most sport yellow badges, pegging them as part of the joint venture, while the rest of the Microsoft employees wear blue tags. With a yellow badge, one can walk past doors with signs bearing such ominous sounding nameplates as the "cryogenic vat room" before entering MSNBC's secured newsroom.

"The notion of Microsoft people wandering through here is something we have to be a little sensitive to," says Brown, who joined the enterprise last May. "It's not Microsoft per se, it's that the Microsoft people and those in the computer software business shouldn't be looking over the reporters' shoulders. When people come in and say, 'How is Microsoft doing?' I say, 'This is not Microsoft. It's MSNBC.' "

What's happening inside the MSNBC newsroom is really not top secret. MSNBC is trying to become one brand with two operations--an NBC-dominated cable shop in Fort Lee, New Jersey, and a multimedia, interactive Internet arm in Redmond. Programs are developed simultaneously for cable and the Internet, with some original material created for the Web. The goal is cross-pollination. MSNBC journalists are constantly searching for ways to make television and the Internet compatible, to create material for the Internet that's complementary to what's on NBC, CNBC (NBC's cable station) and MSNBC, as well as to figure out ways for users to interact with the news.

"We are pushing software development in ways it's never been pushed before," says Michael Silberman, a CBS refugee who is MSNBC's executive editor. If a graphic or an interactive chart can't be created, journalists tap into the infinite brain power available from the legions of Microsoft employees. The attitude is always the same: "We've got the brain power to do it. So let's do it."

Last fall Sports Editor Ed Macedo, formerly of the San Jose Mercury News, decided he wanted to poll the site's visitors on how they ranked pro football teams, updating the results as soon as each respondent weighed in. So he turned to program manager Brenden West, asking West to come up with a plan in eight hours. "It was one of those things that looked simple, but it took me a couple of days. There's no way I could explain to them [the journalists] what was involved," says West. "Oh yeah, they were impatient because I didn't make the deadline. In this case, it was something that broke new ground. I wasn't even sure I could do it." But he did.

Says Merrill Brown, "We are constantly trying to figure out how to tell the story, how to integrate multimedia, how to use computer software to tell the story, and striving to operate at some level in sync with our cable counterpart."

It isn't easy. Having Jane Pauley at the end of her MSNBC cable show, "Time & Again," suggest viewers turn to the Internet for more information on that day's program is the easy part. Getting video from her show to stream across a computer screen for longer than 15 seconds is a technical hurdle of the first degree. But the potential is there.

Potential is what it's all about. Right now, when someone goes to http://www.msnbc.com, they encounter a graphically charged Web site not unlike other media venues. The cover page has the day's headlines, updated every three hours. Occasionally, there's a bulletin encouraging viewers to tune into CNBC or MSNBC cable or "Dateline NBC" or to watch "InterNight," a cable program designed to visually explore the Internet. "Readers" can scroll through the categories: World, Commerce, Sports, SciTech and Life, each with two stories, often staff-generated. One day in late January, the cover page offered stories on Charles Murray's latest book, a bomb blast at an abortion clinic, the lack of competition between cable and phone companies and an interactive quiz on one's financial health.

Interaction is what the new medium is seeking. Not only can you customize a front page to reflect your interests by filling out a questionnaire, it's possible to type in your opinion about a story or issue, or follow link after link on any topic that grabs your attention--until you are drowning in more information than you ever needed. During President Clinton's second inauguration, MSNBC had a live still camera trained on the swearing-in ceremony. Viewers on the Internet could operate the camera, zooming in on people or playing with the camera angles. Although designed to handle many requests, the feature was swamped and difficult to use. But it certainly was novel.

IT WAS THE POTENTIAL that drew Michael Silberman and his wife, Emily Eldridge, to Redmond in October 1995. After almost 11 years at CBS in New York City, Silberman saw all too clearly what the next five years would be like. When "Eye to Eye with Connie Chung" was canceled, Silberman lost his job as a producer of that show. CBS talked to him about a variety of positions, but each was all too reminiscent of what he'd been doing.

Then a friend of his wife who works at Microsoft called the couple. Silberman perked up. He liked what he heard. "The appeal was to develop or create interactive television news," says Silberman, whose wife, a former associate producer for "Dateline NBC," now works for "Underwire" on MSN. (While MSNBC is a joint venture, Microsoft continues to maintain its own online service, MSN.)

"I can't think of another place in journalism where you can be doing something completely new that's never been done before," Silberman says. "I didn't leave traditional journalism because I felt disillusioned, as many have. It was much more the draw of doing something new. The easy thing is to stay with what you know."

What Silberman knows is how to produce a television news show, and that expertise, he says, lends itself nicely to the World Wide Web. "A lot of what I learned as a television producer translates to the Web because it really is a visual medium," he says. "We are now always trying to figure out how to best present layers and layers of information to folks." During last summer's Democratic National Convention in Chicago, Silberman and his team produced a multimedia retrospective of the 1968 convention using still pictures, text, audio spots from the time and footage from the NBC archives.

Silberman says that things are settling down after the bumpy early days. "We're getting into a rhythm," he says. "We are sort of moving out of the start-up mode and focusing on who we are writing for and what we think is important."

And coordination between the two media has improved sharply, in his view. "The main way we used NBC correspondents before was to do a phoner and put that in a story as an audio link," he says. "Now we are starting to work with them to produce stories for the Internet that have an NBC correspondent's byline."

THE IRRESISTIBLE CHALLENGE of a start-up drew Mark Pawlosky to MSN News, MSNBC's forerunner, from the Wall Street Journal's Dallas bureau in 1995. Pawlosky rejected the company's first overture. But as he thought more about the prospect of developing new and exciting ways of providing news and information to computer users, he became intrigued.

Now he's business editor and executive producer, supervising a staff of 16 and happy he made the move. "I really wanted to make an impact and have some influence on journalism," he says. "And it's more likely to happen here."

Newspaper people, disheartened by the cutbacks that have plagued their industry, are particularly drawn to Redmond. There they encounter a world where money appears to be no object, and new ideas are eagerly embraced.

Dan Fisher, who spent 27 years as a reporter and editor at the Los Angeles Times, decided to take the leap soon after new Times Mirror chief Mark H. Willes arrived in 1995 with budget ax in hand ready to cut, cut, cut. Fisher's last job at the Times before he joined Microsoft in January 1996 was working on starting TimesLink, the company's online service, which debuted in October 1994. "We'd been looking at a three-year leash to see if we could make money," Fisher says. "Then at seven months they were trying to cut it back. That was disturbing."

When a headhunter called in August 1995, Fisher jumped at the chance to be managing editor of Microsoft's "Sidewalk," an online city entertainment guide set to debut in March. "This would be like getting an opportunity to do this new thing called television in 1931," says Fisher, who has since become managing editor of MSN's "Investor" Web site.

The advent of MSNBC had special resonance for Sheila Kaplan, a former investigative producer for ABC. When she was working on a master's in journalism at the University of California at Berkeley, she watched "as half the class" went off to join an offbeat experiment in Atlanta launched by someone named Ted Turner: an all-news cable network. After graduating, Kaplan took the safe route as a newspaper reporter.

"I thought at the time I wouldn't go there," she says. "It had just started. Who knew what it was going to be?" Now, she adds, "the people I went to journalism school with are all running CNN. I didn't want to make the same mistake twice."

Kaplan is an investigative producer for MSNBC on the Internet. "I wanted to do something more substantial than television, but I missed print," says Kaplan, who moved to Redmond from Washington, D.C., last June. "But once in TV, I liked what you could do with sound and video. To me, MSNBC was the best of both worlds: taking the substance of print and adding in the creativity of TV, without having the constraints of length and space."

What inspired many to defect to the Microsoft campus were mid-career ruts. Some who have flocked there had been doing journalism for over a decade. Too many stories seemed formulaic. While some might have eventually left the field, MSNBC provided a new way of getting them jazzed about journalism again.

That was the case for Andrea Hamilton, now an MSNBC writer/editor (or content provider) who left a good job (metro desk reporter) in one of the biggest cities in the world (New York) with one of the world's best news organizations (the Associated Press). "I needed to do something else," Hamilton says. "I'm 39. I'd always wanted to be a writer, but I'd been slotted as an editor."

Hamilton was impressed by the people who interviewed her at MSNBC. "They asked really intelligent questions," she says. But she was also told: "Do we know where we are going to be in six months? No. Can you live with that? How do you feel about working in a completely chaotic environment? Can you live with that?" She could. Hamilton packed up her apartment in Greenwich Village and began work last July.

WHILE IT CAN BE EXCITING,, the transition from traditional news to the culture of this new world of journalism is not always seamless. When television producers talk in a meeting about b-roll, or print people refer to the nut graph, no translations are necessary. But here former television types are apt to throw around jargon that baffles their print partners, and vice versa. Add computer whizzes to the mix and the need for translators can arise.

"Microsoft has its own language," says Kathleen Flinn, a "Sidewalk" producer who left a job as editor of the glossy magazine "Internet Underground" to try Microsoft. "They say things like, 'You own that link. I'll own getting data on coffee houses.' It's odd because they use three-letter acronyms like BTW (by the way) and TIA (thanks in advance). I'm used to seeing that in e-mail, but they speak it. That's why you sit in meetings and say, 'Huh?' "

"Microspeak," as it's come to be called, is a combination of technical terms, business school-ese and, now, journalistic shorthand. It's not unusual to hear that one must "disambiguate," which means to clarify. The expression "We've got the cycles" baffled ex-L.A. Timesman Fisher at first, but now he knows it means "We have the available brain power to work on the problem."

"This is the first place I've worked in where I sit in on conversations and I don't understand what someone is saying," says David Guilbault, who worked as a producer for ABC for 20 years.

But there are bright moments. Mike Gordon, who worked for newspapers for 22 years, most recently at the Atlanta Journal & Constitution, offers one. "We can baffle the software guys with newsroom slang at will," he says, "although they're catching on. One of the program managers was heard saying, 'Let's cut to the nut graph.' "

To combat the sense of alienation in a strange culture, last August Flinn formed the Society for Displaced Journalists' Microsoft Chapter. She came up with the idea after attending an opening party for Slate, Microsoft's online magazine edited by Michael Kinsley. "It was really nice to talk to people like me," she recalls. The group meets monthly at various watering holes and has a pool tournament coming up.

Flinn's opening salvo seeking disenfranchised journalists read: "If you've ever found yourself lost by technobabble in meetings, then SDJ is for you. (e.g., 'We were working on the OLE init conflict with the ODBC drivers but we couldn't make any progress because the repro case wasn't happening in our domain.') "

The sense of participating in the birth of a new medium and finding a new place for original journalism, however, buoys spirits. No one seems to care much that MSNBC is available to just 30 million households. As to how many people read the daily report on the Internet, no one really knows. (PC-Meter, a kind of Nielsen ratings for the Web, reported that MSNBC ranked sixth in usage in the news, information and entertainment category in the last quarter of 1996). Those toiling in Fort Lee and Redmond work as hard as they would for the networks or major newspapers, yet without a network-sized audience or the influence of a dominant local daily.

"It doesn't bother me yet," says Kaplan. "If three years from now it's still like that, I might be bothered. Right now, I'm not paying attention to who is looking at it. I'm just having fun."