TV's Threat Gets Bigger On The Web

How The TV Networks Are Competing With Papers

In the local news market, newspapers have always gone up against local television affiliates. Now the Web is making TV an even bigger competitor for papers.

By Kevin Featherly

In February 1998, the fashionably late Tiffany network finally joined the online news fray. With the debut of CBS.com, the network became the last of the Big Three television broadcasters to commit itself both commercially and journalistically to the World Wide Web. ABC and NBC had both been there for months, while cable news giant CNN was online before most people ever even heard the phrase "Web browser."

From the perspective of the major online newspapers, having all those networks slugging it out with them, competing 24 hours a day for a common audience on a single electronic playing field, must seem at least vaguely threatening. Television, after all, clobbers newspapers in terms of audience size and reach. Their Web sites can be promoted instantly to millions of people at relatively low cost. Plus, there's all that talk of a coming TV-Web convergence, and even the suggestion that TV Web sites might chip away at the newspaper's golden calf, the classified ad.

In contrast to newspapers, TV stations dramatically improve their core services online. There are even a few people whispering that broadcasters might one day leverage the Web to make a run at newspapers' primary asset, their depth and quality of news coverage. A few TV sites - MSNBC on the Internet comes to mind - may already be on that path. "Of course, we are very much eager to do as many things as well as the New York Times or the Washington Post do," said Merrill Brown, editor in chief at MSNBC. "And, maybe, someday we will."

Maybe. But don't look for Douglas Feaver to lose any sleep over it. "I don't think it's a new situation," said Feaver, editor of washingtonpost.com and a 20-year Post veteran. "I think it's as old as competition in news." Despite its hype as a news medium, the Internet has brought about only one truly major development to the Post, according to Feaver - a new way to deliver his company's news content. Little else has changed. The paper still employs a squadron of some of the world's best journalists, and the networks still look to the Post when searching for each night's lead on-air story.

Hourly, Not Daily Deadlines

Even the Web's pressure to produce news quicker doesn't really change things that much at the Post, Feaver contends. For years, Post reporters have been filing early takes of stories for the Washington Post-New York Times partnership in Paris, the International Herald Tribune, which has a much earlier deadline. "I know how to work fast," he said.

In any event, washingtonpost.com posts a new edition around midnight every day. That version contains some of the biggest breaking Post stories, which print readers won't see until hours later. But online readers at midnight who visit the site again at noon will often see few changes, with the exception of links to widely available Associated Press stories that are updated throughout the day. Washingtonpost.com doesn't seem to be taking the "up-to-the-minute" Web mantra totally to heart.

Feaver concedes that there are new opportunities for newspapers with video and audio, just as there are enhanced textual capabilities for broadcasters. There are new commercial opportunities online, as well. But Feaver believes this is business as usual: Newspapers have always tinkered with business strategies in changing times. Even the presence of WSC-TV, the local NBC affiliate carrying the MSNBC brand into the Washington metro area, represents more of the same old thing, Feaver said.

"Channel 4 News in Washington has a very aggressive local news staff that we've competed against for years," Feaver said. "I spent 20 years in the Post newsroom before I came to washingtonpost.com, a large number of those years on the city desk, so I'm familiar with what the competition is that Channel 4 has to offer. I'm not seeing anything on MSNBC, by the time we get down to the Channel 4 local news product, that I haven't been watching on Channel 4 for years, in terms of competition to what we do."

In other words, Feaver said, "I think the basic underpinning of the Washington Post has always been to try and deliver the best possible product, on whatever it was doing. Now, we're trying to deliver the best possible product [on the Web], and maybe we're going to deliver it a little bit earlier because of the competitive pressure, but, honestly, it's the same game. It's the same game I've been in all my life."

Papers Mimicking Print Version On Web

MSNBC is playing a different game than washingtonpost.com, Brown claims. "Mr. Feaver is a good man," said a saucy Brown. "I'm sorry he's living in the 80s." A former Washington Post staffer himself, Brown said newspapers are making a mistake if they are only trying to mimic their print edition online. The Web has changed the rules of news irrevocably, he contends. MSNBC.com, a site that is promoted on the air and on cable every day by three national NBC Television properties, claims a monthly audience of about 5 million people. Brown said 1.1 million users visited the site on Aug. 17, the president's mea culpa day. Its audience is so big that MSNBC.com claims to be the equivalent of the nation's fifth-largest daily newspaper, print or otherwise.

"The Internet is changing people's news habits dramatically," Brown said. "When news breaks, when they want up-to-the-minute stock quotes, when they want to know what their baseball team has done, when they want to know what Clinton said - in any high news-interest situation - it is becoming the first place people go. They don't wait for the morning paper. They don't wait for the Evening News with Anchor Person X. They go to the Internet."

Brown said he admires the Washington Post's Web site for what it is, an online reflection of the face and voice of the newspaper. "I would not be critical of it for a moment in its core mission of putting the Washington Post - the newspaper - onto the Internet," Brown said. "They may feel it's their niche to provide everybody today's Washington Post online. That may be the right strategy for them." But it may also be a fatally limited strategy, Brown suggests. "I don't want to sound arrogant about it, but I think the New York Times and the Washington Post are actually chasing us," he said.

MSNBC, ABCNews.com, and CBS.com all seem driven by many of the same notions. Each network has fewer people to work with than the likes of the Post, New York Times or Los Angeles Times, so each must take maximum advantage of the tools of their usual trade, plus the new tools made available to them by the Internet. In that spirit, each network works hard to combine the dramatic impact of TV, the immediacy of radio, the depth and integrity of newspapers, the 24-hour delivery of cable and the community reach of their built-in local affiliation systems.

"It's a wonderful opportunity," said Joshua Platt, a senior analyst for sales and marketing at CBS New Media. "What the Web offers that neither TV nor a newspaper offers is infinite space. The only thing that constrains us in how much material we can publish is the size of our servers and how fast we can type. And, of course, the size of our staff."

In contrast, while some newspaper companies like Knight Ridder are beginning to rethink their online strategies, many others continue to treat the Internet as just another kind of newspaper. In that sense, some argue, newspapers may be drowning in a sea of their own rich content, lulled into reasoning that by simply repackaging themselves for a computer readership, they will find equal success on the Web.

"It is natural that a newspaper entering the online arena would, to a certain degree, view it as an extension of its old business," said John Pavlik, executive director for the Center for New Media at Columbia University in New York. "But I think this view will only go so far and will ultimately prove quite limiting. I view the Internet as a new medium. It requires a new form of journalism."

Papers Not Always Interactive

To be sure, newspapers are responding, by occasionally integrating multimedia and interactive elements. It is hardly uncommon now to see an online newspaper featuring sound clips or video files, usually supplied by AP, that augment important stories. Some, like the Minneapolis Star Tribune even occasionally publish italicized tags at the end of stories in their print editions, promoting video files available online.

This only goes part of the way, by Pavlik's reckoning. He thinks newspapers and broadcasters once operated in separate but parallel universes; now they have been pushed onto the same stage, performing before a single audience. Meanwhile, the scale of their competition has ballooned beyond anything they ever before encountered. There are now more than 3,000 newspapers online, more than 800 television stations and more than 1,000 radio stations. There is quasi-news competition from corporate sources like Amazon.com that would not have tried to tap the information market in the past. "This level of news access changes the scale of competition and forces those involved in the business to develop new strategic thinking," Pavlik said.

Are the online TV networks further ahead of the curve in terms of this new strategic thinking than newspapers? It's possible. Right now, there are a number of similarities in the way the Big Three approach news on the Web. All have their eye on local classified-ad revenues, and each thus struggles to attract local TV affiliates to participate in Web-content partnerships. Each has achieved some success. Each network site employs a separate Internet news staff to rewrite or re-report new scripts, making the material useful to online readers; MSNBC and ABC have even gotten some TV correspondents to write for the Web.

Each uses audio and video extensively to accompany story text, a practice that will only increase as Internet bandwidth improves. They all include such interactive features as instant online polls, Shockwave animations and slide-show presentations. And, like the online newspapers, each network site engages in far-flung content and commerce pacts with outside companies like CMP Publications and Borders Books, many of which would be almost inconceivable for television networks themselves to take part in.

Bonnie Coverage

In terms of editorial coverage, the networks are running national stories with links to local affiliates for local news, but the depth of local coverage varies widely. A look at how the networks and major newspapers covered a recent major story, Hurricane Bonnie, might be instructive. Each network's Web site was monitored during the evening of Aug. 26. To compare the networks with newspapers, coverage from the Post, New York Times and Los Angeles Times is also surveyed.

MSNBC on the Internet

MSNBC, the Web-cable partnership between NBC and Microsoft, was the networks' first shot at providing online news, and among the Big Three it remains arguably the best - among TV operations, only CNN is better. But even more than CNN, MSNBC.com has design flash. It provides relatively deep content, and runs just ahead of CBS in packaging video, audio and multimedia content into its news pages.

While Bonnie was lashing the North Carolina coast, MSNBC.com was presenting solid, comprehensive news of the event - particularly for those Web viewers with the software plug-ins, the modem speed and the patience to explore the story's numerous multimedia and external Web links. Here's a rundown on MSNBC's Bonnie coverage:

• Text: In sharp contrast to major newspaper stories published that night, MSNBC's online hurricane story was a mere 501 words long. Attributed to "MSNBC Staff and Wire Reports," the story was an intelligently rewritten version of television coverage furnished by NBC-TV and the MSNBC cable channel (it also contained some Associated Press and Reuters information). It was nicely packaged with MSNBC's patented, three-dimensional home-page header and a big, impressive photo of hurricane damage snapped from NBC video. Like all the networks, MSNBC's Bonnie story also provided prominent navigation buttons to other areas of the site where they could look at business, sports or health news, and numerous other kinds of information published on the site.
• Interactivity: Included with the main Bonnie story were numerous interactive features, including a full-color, Java-based animated feature illustrating the birth of a hurricane; multi-part graphical presentations illustrating the effect of oceanic storm surges; an interactive table outlining the Saffir-Simpson scale used to determine a hurricane's severity; an interactive slide show on past hurricanes, including footage of the devastating Galveston, Texas, hurricane of 1900 that killed 7,500 people.
• Video: The presentation spotlighted a six-minute MSNBC-TV news package featuring anchor Brian Williams and several NBC correspondents who were at the scene. Not surprisingly, MSNBC.com relies heavily on Microsoft's Windows Media Player for its streaming video content.
• Graphics: In addition to the page-topping hurricane image, the page included an HTML table pinpointing the storm's current position. It also included a detailed color graphic showing coastal areas affected by the hurricane.
• Affiliate coverage: Strict design and content rules MSNBC imposes on participating TV affiliates makes it possible to blend affiliates' local coverage directly in to the main site's coverage. The mothership site includes a page containing 14 links to local hurricane coverage from 12 local MSNBC affiliate sites. There is a uniform look and feel to the local sites, making the transition from the national site to the affiliate a seamless one for the viewer.
• Also of note: Dyed-in-the-wool newspaper folks must go nuts when they see how ads are positioned on MSNBC.com stories. Square banner ads are embedded in the story itself, between the lead and the body of the text. The user cannot avoid them while scrolling down the computer screen. It is the most audacious use of advertising on any of the networks' Web sites.

CBS.com

While not as flashy as its online TV-network counterparts, it could be argued that, among the online networks, CBS.com puts the most pressure on MSNBC to provide in-depth news coverage.

"You want my real, honest opinion? I think MSNBC does it real well," CBS' Platt says. "I think CNN is the best. I'd say CBS is a strong third and I think ABC is behind us." It should be noted that ABCNews.com consisently ranks third in online readership behind MSNBC.com and CNN Interactive. CBS.com gets a much smaller audience share, according to the major Internet tracking firms.

That's at least partly because CBS was admittedly late in the game, Platt says. But, like Bonnie, the network stormed onto the Web all at once last February, unleashing a full-blown national news service backed by 160 local Web affiliates. That last number may dwindle next year when CBS, alone among the networks, begins charging a fee to local TV stations for the right to affiliate.

Then again, if quality network coverage like CBS' online work on Hurricane Bonnie is any barometer, affiliates may choose to stick around. When the site was first accessed on Aug. 26, Bonnie was not CBS' top story of the night. Instead, CBS.com's story about the explosion of a satellite-laden rocket briefly topped the site's news. But a half-hour later, Bonnie was shifted to the top of the list.

• Text: CBS published another short story by newspaper standards, this one measuring about 550 words. Its only byline was "CBS," but the story quoted on-air correspondents as sources of information. It was packaged with a large, 370-pixel by 278-pixel AP photo of a pier in Myrtle Beach, S.C., being pounded by surf. The story gave to-the-point descriptions of the storm's position, its path and the damage it had caused up to that point.
• Interactivity: The story contained links to interactive weather maps from CBS content partner, the Weather Channel. It also had a slide show not unlike MSNBC's, but CBS chose to focus on current weather maps and images from the scene, rather than on history. There were also links to an interactive video simulation of a storm surge, and to an animated storm-tracker created with Shockwave software. One interactive graphic described the costliest U.S. hurricanes in history.
• Video: CBS is arguably the best among the networks at presenting video segments to augment news text. Almost all its stories are accompanied by several CBS or local affiliate video packages; the Bonnie story contained two segments produced by the network: one from the "Public Eye" program, and the other from CBS-TV news coverage. The page also contained links to hourly live satellite feeds from the network that aired until 11 p.m. EST, plus a link to live online video coverage produced by affiliate WRAL-TV in Raleigh, N.C. CBS provides video content in both Windows Real Media and G2 RealVideo formats.
• Graphics: To accompany the Bonnie story that night, the page contained full-color weather maps provided by the Weather Channel, in addition to the page-topping storm photo. Icons placed throughout the story were used as links to additional related information contained on other pages in the site.
• Also of note: CBS.com stories have one peculiarity not unique to the Bonnie coverage - all quotes are highlighted in boldface text. This seems to be a throwback to the way close-captioned text is presented on television, and it is a bit distracting.

CBS piles on background by archiving related stories as they are reported, and making them all available through links from current stories. This made it possible to package links to no less than 20 background stories about Hurricane Bonnie. Each background story also contains its own video and interactive features.

In addition to links to National Weather Service and the Weather Channel, CBS' Bonnie story contained a link to beach Webcams featured on the Go-carolinas.com site. It was hard to make out those images at night, however.

ABCNews.com

ABCNews.com, produced in tandem by ABCNews and Disney-owned Starwave Corp., has designed its site to highlight the dark, serious blue hues of the network's on-air studio set. It works; after MSNBC, ABCNews.com probably is the most attractive of the Big Three Web sites - as a result of its design, it "feels" like an ABC product.

• Text: ABC's online Bonnie story was the longest of the bunch, but still very short at 571 words. It was written by site staffers, with additional information from the wires stirred into the mix. It is notable that reporter Jan M. Faust, on location during the storm, wrote a series of brief yet effectively anecdotal stories about Bonnie.
• Video: The story of Aug. 26 linked to a page containing four RealVideo packages from ABC-TV. Each video segment was between one minute and four minutes long. A still image from each video and a brief written description were used to introduce the segments.
• Background: Rather than republishing every story they've written on the subject, ABC collected, on a single page, hyperlinks to only the key Bonnie background stories, all packaged as a special hurricane section off the main story page. One of these, "Birth of a Hurricane," was extremely short, but contained particularly eye-catching and informative storm graphics, presumably produced by Starwave.
• Also of note: Among the Big Three networks, ABCNews.com provides possibly the most clever and jaunty headlines. "Home Swept Home" was the headline of one Bonnie-related story. "They Got Game" was the headline of a feature on a summer basketball league.

Newspapers

Three online newspapers surveyed the night of Aug. 26 and 27 (the Washington Post, New York Times and Los Angeles Times) handled Bonnie much the way you'd expect.

The New York Times on the Web's approach was the least Web-intensive, containing nothing but 1,300 words of text. No graphics, no photos, no animations, no links. Just the same well-informed, high-quality news that would appear in the morning's print editions, but minus photos.

Washingtonpost.com, on the other hand, put more thought into their Web presentation. In addition to the paper's 1,475-word story (a collaborative effort by four reporters), the site contained links to two Post background stories, plus a series of links to various kinds of multimedia content. Among those features was an animated graphic depicting the storm's path, which was prepared for the Web by the AccuWeather service.

The Los Angeles Times struck the difference. Its 1,200-word story, also a collaborative reporting effort, was placed on an attractively designed page with several interesting photo images. It also had links to five previously published background stories, but there were no multimedia features.

Networks Aim Locally

The networks make no bones about it. They want to use their national Web sites, and their online affiliate connections, to drill down as far into the local markets as they can. That's where the new revenue sources lie. Former CBS new media director Dean Daniels said earlier this year that if CBS could use affiliate resources to provide local garbage routes to Web users in Peoria, Ill., and make money, they would do it.

MSNBC's Brown says he doesn't rule it out, either. "That content is already out there," MSNBC's Brown said. "The problem isn't the technology, the problem is the journalism. It's about whether there are local institutions that can actually get that done for us."

Local online garbage routes would be an example of the new form of journalism Columbia's Pavlik calls for, which he has named "contextualized journalism." (He details the concept in his forthcoming Columbia University Press book, Journalism and New Media.) Simply put, contextualized journalism is the use of powerful online tools - hyperlinks, multimedia, personalized features, etc. - to tell stories in unique and fresh ways that make new connections within communities.

"I see it," Pavilk said, "as especially important in creating news programming that allows the reporter to make links to historical content, associations to related issues and problems, as well as other informational resources and background that can help viewers who want to drill deeper. Or go local."

By that standard, only the New York Times on the Web failed to practice contextualized journalism in its Bonnie coverage. Washingtonpost.com did the best job among the online newspapers surveyed, and CBS did perhaps the best job as a network. But all three networks engaged in it extensively.

And that's not surprising, Pavlik said. With the exception of TV network-based Web sites, not many news operations have multimedia tools at their disposal. Those that do may not have a news culture that understands how to best use those tools. And since most news organizations view the Web as an extension of their main product, they don't view video and audio as terribly relevant, Pavlik said.

This suggests television networks, with their affiliate extensions into so many communities across the country, might have a big advantage over national newspapers like the Post and the Times. At last count, MSNBC had 89 online local affiliates, some of them first-class Web operations in their own right. ABC had 63 Web affiliates and CBS had 160 of them, though many of those two networks' sites remain journalistically undeveloped.

Still, papers like the Post and Times, when they touch local markets at all, usually rely on Associated Press material that is widely available across the Web. That's not a great marketing advantage. Nonetheless, Pavlik cautions, don't rule out the ability of local newspapers, or even nationwide newspaper chains, to come to grips with the demands of the coming online journalism.

"I suppose networked media, especially television, might have an advantage," Pavlik said. "But newspapers have the strength of in-depth reporting and deep community roots to build upon. I think either might do well."

Whoever has the better plan, it is clear that the race to your hometown is on. Online newspapers have the obvious lead at present; most of them have been online longer than their TV counterparts, and they've got the advantage of deep content that is friendly to the Web's current text-heavy environment.

But one thing is certain: As information technology evolves and bandwidth widens, TV will pose a bigger threat. And the networks are gradually paving the way to make the most of it. "We think inventing Web news is our mandate," said MSNBC's Brown. "This is a very large challenge that we've set for ourselves."

Originally published by Editor & Publisher, Nov. 1, 1998

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Kevin Featherly, a former managing editor at Washington Post Newsweek Interactive, is a Minnesota journalist who covers politics and technology. He has authored or contributed to five previous books, Guide to Building a Newsroom Web Site (1998), The Wired Journalist (1999), Elements of Language (2001), Pop Music and the Press (2002) and Encyclopedia of New Media (2003). His byline has appeared in Editor & Publisher, the San Francisco Chronicle, the St. Paul Pioneer Press, Online Journalism Review and Minnesota Law and Politics, among other publications. In 2000, he was a media coordinator for Web, White & Blue, the first online presidential debates.

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Copyright 2004, by Kevin Featherly

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