When Push Comes to News
Push technology, the Internet's trend du jour, allows online news sites to "narrow-cast" personalized news directly to readers. Online publishers hope it will also push them into profitability.
By
J.D. Lasica
J.D. Lasica is a former AJR new-media columnist.
FOR NEWS CONSUMERS AND PUBLISHERS ALIKE, 1997 may well mark a seismic shift in the way content is delivered on the Internet.
The phenomenon goes by many names: Push technology. Webcasting. Netcasting. Personal broadcast applications. Channel technology. Internet news broadcasting.
All refer to a technological revolution that is redefining the relationship between online news operations and their readers. And even if you're not a cyberspace cowboy, push news should interest you because it has the potential to reshape the fundamentals of journalism in much the same way that television news has altered the rules of the profession.
Simply put, push changes the online news equation. We no longer have to surf for news and information. News finds us. Call it the Third Wave of Net news.
In the First Wave, newspapers launched primitive sites with cumbersome search tools, started their own members-only services, or hooked up with an online service like CompuServe, Prodigy or America Online. Few news consumers were dazzled.
The Second Wave hit when the public and mainstream media discovered the World Wide Web back in early 1995. All major news publications stampeded to the Web. And millions of Netheads, long starved for color and graphics, surfed away in a vast, communal infotopia.
But it's been a rocky love affair. Sputtering through cyberspace on clunky 14.4-kilobits-per-second modems, wading through gigabytes of junk information, using search engines that return 147,710 hits on "Norman Mailer," dealing with dead links, boorish flamers and "interactive" news sites that don't respond to e-mail messages--is it any wonder that we're feeling overwhelmed and just a bit cranky? Fully half of regular users in one recent survey reported that they don't surf anymore; they visit the same sites whenever they log on.
Which is why so many Internet users--now estimated at 51 million in the United States and Canada--are eager to embrace the Third Wave: push technology.
"Push" refers to the concept of delivering content to Internet consumers rather than expecting them to seek out a Web site--the "pull" model. (Think of good old e-mail as the ultimate push and Web surfing as the ultimate pull.)
But push news is more than simply a matter of dropping a publication's Web site on your digital doormat. Push news empowers readers by letting them specify what content they want delivered, as well as how often. The best push media allow consumers to customize and micro-tailor their news choices. The new tools of push delivery are evolving with quicksilver rapidity, and they promise to make 1997 a watershed year.
Why now? What's the impetus behind the Third Wave? A confluence of three factors: technology, money and a receptive public. For consumers, online news operations and software vendors, the push model offers something for everyone in the online news equation: Users generally like push because it delivers time savings, reliability, context and familiarity.
"The Net is just so bloody slow," says Jay Verkler, chief executive of inCommon, a push software startup in San Mateo, California. Having part of a Net publication's content delivered behind the scenes to a user's hard drive eliminates the bottleneck created by traffic snarls on the World Wide Wait. "Our studies show that most people return to the same places on the Web 90 percent of the time. They want those ruts in the road." The push companies--content distributors like PointCast and software developers like inCommon and BackWeb--add value to the equation by letting the content folks do what they do best--gather and report the news. These online middlemen either provide the technical know-how--a sophisticated software package like inCommon's Downtown--or else they bring along a broad new audience, like PointCast and Excite. The main force driving push, however, is the online publishers. They like push for several reasons.
"The push idea is more compatible with the traditional media publishing model," says Steve Harmon, senior investment analyst for Mecklermedia, the leading Internet trade show and publishing firm. "Any magazine editor knows you'd rather have readers fill out a subscription card rather than go to a newsstand with 500 titles, which is what you now have with the Web's hunting and gathering tools."
As online editors know well, it's hard to rely on readers to come back to your site day after day. But even when visitors on the Web do stop by, it's often an anonymous, amorphous relationship.
"The Web is like a billboard. You may know the demographics of that particular stretch of highway, but you don't know anything about the individuals," says Patrick Naughton, senior vice president of technology for Starwave, a personalized content service. "Push strips away the anonymity. It gives us a one-to-one relationship with the customer."
"Push is going to be huge on the Web," Harmon says. Mecklermedia forecasts that as much as 50 percent of all Web use could be via push or a push-pull combination in just the next two years. The Yankee Group, a market-research firm in Boston, predicts that within three years, nearly a third of the projected $19.1 billion in annual Internet revenue will derive from push media.
In practice, however, push is still so new--the term didn't even come into general usage until 1995--that to describe it is like trying to sketch a moving object. But as push news develops, some early lessons are already crystallizing.
"I know of a college professor who decided to stop reading newspapers and get all his news from PointCast," says Allegra Young, marketing manager for USA Today Information Network. "But he found he was missing out on 90 percent of current events. There's a lot of unpredictability about what news makes a difference in your world. To be a well-read citizen, you need to know more than what you woke up thinking you needed to know."
Which leads to Vin Crosbie's three rules of push. "Push is valuable if you know what you want, if you don't have a lot of time and if you want to receive something regularly," says Crosbie, a new media consultant in Brookline, Massachusetts.
"Push won't replace the morning newspaper that you read over your morning coffee, at least in the foreseeable future," he says. "But it's a valuable personalized supplement to your news diet."
Push news comes in a dizzying array of shapes and flavors, and the flavor you choose depends on whether you're a heavy information consumer or just an info grazer. For simplicity's sake, then, let's look at push not in terms of the technology but from the perspective of how it will serve us. News Alerts
Brad Templeton, publisher of ClariNet Communications, whose text-based Clari-News service has 1.7 million subscribers, recalls working at his computer in 1989 when he heard a beep and saw a news flash pop up on his screen: U.S. INVADES PANAMA. "That was six years before some people claimed they did the first push and broadcast news service on the Net," Templeton says. "The truest form of push is something that literally grabs you, makes your pager beep, pops up a window to interrupt what you're doing. But users will tolerate very little of that, and they'll have to have a high level of input on what they want to be alerted about."
Already the outlines of this news world are taking shape. Mercury Mail (www.merc.com), a Denver startup that launched in June 1996, will e-mail news briefs, sports results, box scores, weather information--even birthday and anniversary reminders--to your electronic mailbox for free. Quote.com (www.quote.com) will provide investment advice, portfolio updates and stock quotes 15 minutes after they have posted to the stock exchange, also for free.
And now some online news publications are beginning to enter the fray. In February, McClatchy's Nando.net (www.nando.net), the online service of the News & Observer in Raleigh, North Carolina, launched a free content provider that automatically gives users updated news headlines and stories throughout the day via its "NewsWatcher." It also includes a notification feature that alerts you when a news headline includes keywords that you've chosen in advance.
The San Jose Mercury News updates its Web edition (www.sjmercury.com) four times a day with original content. CNN Interactive (www.cnn.com) and ESPNET's SportsZone (www.espnet.sportszone.com) update their news continuously during the day. But few other online news organizations use the Web to report breaking news.
The emerging technology of push-news channels, however, is likely to change all that. A reader using Marimba's Castanet tuner or inCommon's Downtown will be able to tell immediately--through the use of icons or other visual cues--when a news organization with a "channel" on those two "networks" has posted a new story.
All of this assumes that online publications will finally begin posting original news on their Web sites, rather than recycling yesterday's news plus wire-service content. "There are lots of thorny issues about what news do you break in a competitive market," says David Yarnold, former editorial director of Knight-Ridder New Media, now managing editor of the San Jose Mercury News. "But I think 90 percent of what you're working on in a particular day's paper could be digested or mentioned first on the Web."
Rob Caplan, senior marketing manager for inCommon, says, "With ideal push technologies, as soon as the news gets reported, the user should be told about it." But as is often the case, that's a double-edged sword. Is faster better?
The Internet was abuzz February 28 with the word that the Dallas Morning News had used its Web site (www.dallasnews.com) to report that Timothy McVeigh had told a defense team member that the attack on the Oklahoma City federal building was done to create a "body count" that would send a message to the government. The paper's print edition carried the story the following day.
While the Morning News story did not directly involve push technology, the episode points to an unmistakable trend in Net journalism: Readers are beginning to get their breaking news from an online source first.
Dale Peskin, the paper's assistant managing editor for new media, says, "Were we out to make Net history? The answer is no. Did it raise everyone's consciousness about the power of this new storytelling tool? I think the answer is yes. This demonstrates that we're not a print organization, we're a newsgathering organization."
Peskin acknowledges that the desire to be first with the story played a large role in the paper's decision to post the story on its Web site. "Once we informed the defense that we had the story, any number of things could have happened. The story could have been leaked to any number of media organizations. They could have called a press conference to try to discredit the story before it even ran. A competitor could have reported the story and gotten the facts wrong. So, yes, after all the work that went into our coverage, to have someone else break the story first would have been unthinkable."
The Dallas episode has far-reaching implications for online journalism, says Valerie Hyman, who directs programs for broadcast journalists at the Poynter Institute for Media Studies.
"What happened in Dallas is just the tip of the iceberg," she says. "We're beginning to see a push for people who've worked in a print environment to move toward a mindset that the people at the wire services and all-news radio and television have always had. In a world of Web sites and push media, our deadline is continual, our deadline is the next minute." Notification and niche-casting
In addition to breaking news alerts, online content providers have something else in their information arsenal: personalized filtering and search tools.
"I see push as primarily appealing to people with intensively niche-focused interests," Yarnold says. "I'm thinking of two friends of mine, a heart transplant surgeon who keeps up with developments in his field, and an Ohio State alumnus who wants to know everything there is to know about Ohio State football. They're representative of the people who use Newshound," the recently revamped news clipping service.
Many newspapers have their own version of this kind of personalized search tool. Philadelphia Clipper, a service of Philadelphia Online, allows you to write your own request or choose from a list of categories. The results are pushed to you once a day as e-mail or stored on the paper's servers as your own personal Web page.
Several thousand readers are taking advantage of the service, most of them former residents of Philadelphia, says Chris Nelson, webmaster of Philadelphia Online (www.phillynews.com).
According to Nelson, these search tools offer a way for online news publications to make inroads into markets that newspapers have not traditionally served: professionals, businesses and heavy information users. "If you custom-tailor information for individuals with a specialized area of interest or for companies with paralegals or secretaries who track home repossessions or sheriffs' auctions, you're not only providing a valuable service, you're saving them time and money." Terry Schwadron, the Los Angeles Times' deputy managing editor who oversees the paper's Web site, says he's not personally persuaded that push is the second coming of online news. "We have a push technology now," he says. "It weighs a couple of pounds, and we deliver it to your door."
Nonetheless, he adds, "where push will be especially valuable is for highly targeted, specialized information. If you're looking for a house in a specific neighborhood, within a certain price range, with a certain number of bathrooms and in the right school district, you'll want to know just as soon as the house goes on the market. If you care deeply about the Dodgers, you might want an inning-by-inning score sent to your pager. If you want a particular model of a rare automobile, we'll alert you when one becomes available."
Unfortunately, nearly all the search and filtering agents in use today are fairly crude. For several months now I've received a weekly e-mail alert from The Gate (www.sfgate.com), the Web site of the San Francisco Chronicle and Examiner, after signing up to be alerted about job listings containing the word "editor."
The Gate's search agent returns not only job listings, but death notices. One day I received an alert about a features editor job opening--along with a funeral notice for a Jesuit priest who "went peacefully to the Lord" after a career in which he served as associate editor of a Jesuit periodical.
Observes inCommon's Verkler: "A reader is coming to a publisher for some human intelligence, not just software intelligence, which--trust me--isn't there yet."
Go to Part II ###
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