Cringely defends print
http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20060720.html
They Wrap Fish, Don’t They?: Internet News Isn’t What It’s All Wrapped Up to Be By Robert X. Cringely
I have been writing for the World Wide Web since April 1997, which is
about as long as anyone on continuous duty can claim. That’s 480+
columns, totaling just over 800,000 words (at least one version of
the King James Bible, by contrast, has 783,137 words). Every one of
those words, by the way (mine, not the Bible’s) can be found in my
archive and a few of them might even be worth reading. But my point
isn’t that I have written so much, or that I am so old and decrepit
in Internet years, but simply that I can make a fair claim to knowing
how news gets spread around on the Internet — not very well. The
Internet is, in fact, the idiot savant of journalism — supremely
good at a thing or two and not at all good at anything else.
This belief of mine is confirmed, somewhat, by a recent study from
the University of Notre Dame that says news stories survive on the
Web for an average of 36 hours before half of their eventual readers
have read them. This is in contrast with traditional print newspapers
that — since most are published on a daily basis — are typically
read by half their readers in 24 hours or less.
So news lives longer on the Web. Is this good or bad? The news
stories about this news study tended to view the result as an oddity,
noting that most people expected the half-life of news to actually be
shorter on the web than in print, not longer. It’s that speedy
electrons thing. But as a columnist I’m actually paid to have
opinions and mine in this case is that this news stickiness is bad,
very bad, because it means we read less and ultimately learn less
than we did in the past.
Oh we think we’re so smart, with our Google News homepages and our
online subscriptions to the Wall Street Journal. More and more of us
are getting our news from the Internet and that’s hurting newspapers
and ultimately hurting us, too, because we are getting less news
overall.
Newspapers, because they are printed daily, have a lifespan of one
day. And because they generally have several stories on each page, we
have the opportunity to SCAN the news in parallel. These are two huge
advantages of print journalism over its electronic counterpart. In
newspapers, news gets out of the way at the end of each day, leaving
room for more news. On the Internet, we’re still talking about that
safe landing of the Space Shuttle Discovery 48 hours after it
happened. Okay, they’re down, get on with it. So people who get their
news from the Internet may know a lot about Britney Spears’ attitude
toward child car seats, but they don’t know about many other things
because of all that Britney news cluttering the ether.
Internet news also tends to be serial. The New York Times, for
example, has an average of 25 stories each day in its business
section and every one of those stories can be read online. But only a
handful are presented as headlines in the Times web edition. So
unless you are very diligent about ferreting it out, at least 75
percent of the Times’ business content is invisible and unread online.
Yes, we can get our Internet news straight from Kazakhstan if we want
to, but most of us don’t have the language skills or the gumption. We
rely, instead, on aggregators, mainly newspapers, which are again
aggregated by outfits like Google News. The result is that some
information gets to the web long after it gets into print.
Yes, you can beat print deadlines, but it requires EFFORT and readers
generally don’t like to use much of that.
So the result is that those of us who rely on the Internet for our
news tend to get less of it later rather than the more of it earlier
that we think we do.
Of course there are great aspects to Internet news. Small interest
groups are exceedingly well served because their traditional outlets
were weekly or even monthly publications, if publications covering
them existed at all. Slick monthly magazines tend to close their
editorial 10 weeks before the cover date and at least six weeks
before the issue appears. So if you want news about something arcane
or obscure, the Internet is the way to go. But if you want news about
something a lot of people care about, the Internet will often let you
down.
For example, last weekend Network Solutions, the largest Internet
domain registrar and a company that is among the biggest web hosting
companies in the world, had a customer e-mail outage that lasted more
than 24 hours. Between domains and hosting, Network Solutions claims
about 4 million customers, but not all of those get e-mail service
from the company. Still, with some companies having dozens or
hundreds of mail users, we can suppose that there must have been
hundreds of thousands of people who had no e-mail service for more
than a day. Where is the news story about that outage? Nowhere. Of
course the company has said nothing and we can’t point to newspapers
having the story while the Internet does not, but it is an INTERNET
STORY. No one city was affected enough for it to probably matter to a
newspaper, but hundreds of thousands of Internet citizens (including
some relatives of mine, which is how I know about it) WERE affected.
And where are those vaunted bloggers? They are waiting for the
newspapers to write about it so they can read about it on the web and
then comment. Now THERE’s a public service.
But wait, there’s more! Last week I wrote about Skype’s super nodes
and how they steal bandwidth to perform Network Address Translation
( NAT) traversal while keeping eBay’s costs as low as possible. Well
since then Stanford University banned Skype from the campus for
exactly this reason. Stanford has so much bandwidth, so many powerful
workstations, and such gullible, er, friendly people that super nodes
were rampant and seriously affecting network performance. Where is
the story about this? Nowhere.
If it’s a big story that’s important to a lot of people, the Internet
either beats it to death or misses it completely. This is the nature
of the beast and it makes me sad because I sit here on the third
floor of an old house in Charleston, South Carolina banging out these
columns and people ask me “Where do you GET this stuff?”
Not from the Internet.
I talk to people on the phone.
And speaking of phones, last week Yahoo and Microsoft supposedly
connected their instant messaging systems in a move that will
eventually allow full interoperability, which was viewed almost
universally as a defense against the threat of Google. Not so. It is
all about phones.
There are a dozen or more healthy startups that already enable users
to send instant messages from one IM system to another. What MSN and
Yahoo quite specifically announced was the interoperability of their
VOICE chat products, which of course also include text capabilities.
Google is a small player in this space and not doing an especially
good job of competing. What Microsoft and Yahoo care about far more
than market share (which they’ve shown they can maintain — IM users
rarely migrate even for free services) is REVENUE. They want to be
your phone company. And between them their IM operations touch a
third of the Internet homes in both the United States and the world.
That’s an important statistic, because it means that through this
simple (in a business, if not a technical sense) interconnection they
have the prospect of carrying a substantial percentage of world phone
traffic at almost zero cost.
People are still willing to pay for phone service, but profit margins
in that often-regulated industry are historically around 10 percent.
If Microsoft and Yahoo can get into the phone business and can
convert their IM customers into phone customers, they will not only
steal business from the telcos, they’ll do so with profit margins
that are on average 300 percent higher. THAT’s why the telcos hate
net neutrality.
And Google? They’ll eventually be asked to interconnect, too, as will
the real 800-pound gorilla of IM, AOL. The bigger the (off-PSTN)
network the better for all.
Or maybe, since I’m the only one apparently saying this, it isn’t
news at all.