Exploring the Cyberspace Future   

Newspapers will still have a role to play even as online services flourish.

Assume for a few paragraphs a different reality: Almost every home in the country has a computer connected to the Internet and the people who live in those homes use the computers as their primary source of local news and advertising. This has been true for 100 years.

The companies that own the electronic networks supplying the news and advertising are highly profitable and have been complacent, even smug, about their role in the overall scheme of things.

Suddenly, however, their complacency is dashed – replaced by a fear of the future due to the rapid development of a new form of competition that offers a new way to receive news and advertising.

Those taking up the new service are told they will be able to download instantly 50 to 100 large pages (14 by 24 inches) of news and advertising without the need to manipulate a keyboard or view a video screen. The information will be easy to read, portable and easy to save and to separate into segments.

The information will be organized by subject and accompanied by photographs, maps, explanatory graphs and other illustrations, some in full color. Most important, the new competitors offer to deliver all this for just 50 cents a day (about the cost of 10 minutes on America Online), except on Sunday, when the information download triples and the price goes to $1.50.

Already advertisers are clamoring to spend their money on the new service, recognizing the advantages inherent in a system in which consumers can be exposed to all of their offerings, rather than just those selected by the individual at the computer keyboard. It's no wonder that the Internet providers are running scared.

I wish I could claim that the scenario was my own. Instead, a shorter version of it was delivered toward the end of a recent panel discussion on the future of newspapers by Ken Paulson, executive editor of Gannett's 10 suburban dailies north of New York City. The panel met at the annual convention of the Associated Press Managing Editors in Indianapolis.

Paulson's comments offered the kind of insight that probably should have begun the discussion rather than ended it. Moreover, he had interesting suggestions for newspapers that lack the resources of a large company but still want to explore cyberspace.

"The World Wide Web," Paulson said, "has become a great equalizer, allowing anyone with a computer and Internet connection to have an online presence." He added, "You don't need a limo to back out of the driveway."

His point is that by keeping goals and investment modest, it is possible for newspapers to learn a lot about online services – and even make a little money. He bases this on his experience helping to develop online alliances with CompuServe at his newspapers and at Gannett's Florida Today in Melbourne. He said both operations were marginally profitable in the first year.

But Paulson's main point is that as long as newspapers deliver, at low cost, massive amounts of information that would take hours to get out of a computer, they will remain strong businesses. He was one of the first to work in online services, and as he puts it: "The more time I spent at it, the more confident I became of the newspaper business as it exists."

Clearly online services eventually will affect how newspapers conduct their business and may in time offer significant competition for reader attention and advertising revenue. That is why, despite some recent sail-trimming to hold down costs, many newspaper companies are investing in research and development of online products.

Knight-Ridder, for example, which I tweaked in my November column for closing its flat-panel research laboratory, has otherwise stepped up its spending to about $10 million a year to create its New Media Center in San Jose and to develop with partners new online services and other electronic products. (The company concluded that flat panels would take too long to develop.)

A point to remember for newspaper people fearful of cyberspace is that economics in the long run will shape the information future, and right now economics heavily favors newspaper on newsprint. And economics also has meant that no new form of media has ever eliminated an existing form, which is why we still have financially successful companies offering books, magazines, motion pictures, radio, television and, of course, newspapers.

If the various services on the Internet or elsewhere in cyberspace some day acquire enough of the benefits that newspapers already offer, creating a mass market, newspapers will still be there gathering, processing, analyzing, condensing and otherwise serving the reader by separating the wheat from the chaff. l