Reports From Our Fellows Archives

Go To the Web? Three MJF Alumni Who Clicked On and Stayed
Case #1: Newspaper Web Site by Dan Froomkin ’96

One winter day in Ann Arbor about five years ago, I realized I was just too old-fashioned for the modern newspaper business.

So I went into new media.

Counterintuitive? Not really. Because I came to the conclusion that traditional journalistic principles and competencies are invaluable on the Net, and that traditional journalism can flourish in a world of immediacy, interactivity, and endless news hole.

Turns out I was right.

And as it happens, some of the established journalistic traits that I saw being stomped out of people in the increasingly corporate print world — risk-taking, questioning, impudence, impatience — have turned out to be among the most valuable of all online.

I grew up as a Watergate baby who never really thought of doing anything else but being a reporter. I wrote my first news story in sixth grade. After college, I worked for 10 years as a daily newspaper reporter, first at Media General’s Winston-Salem Journal, then Knight-Ridder’s Miami Herald, and finally at Freedom Communication’s Orange County Register.

I had a great time, but I also got more and more frustrated with management. And during the first few months of my Fellowship, I realized that what I was experiencing was happening pretty much everywhere — and most calamitously at newspapers run by corporations, rather than families.

I saw a newspaper industry where horizons were narrowing. Where corporate values such as blandness and shareholders’ interests were edging out edginess and — even worse — common sense. . Where good people made Faustian bargains and became bad editors. Where interesting tools were twisted into idiotic rules. Where the misunderstood whim of a focus group had more clout than a room full of seasoned reporters. Where newspapers were giving up on what made them great in the first place.

The Internet, I thought, could be the antidote. So I changed course.

In the ensuing years, I have come to realize the Internet is not paradise. Yes, the ceaseless news cycle tends against profundity. Yes, titillation outdraws solemnity. And yes, so far it’s been hard to achieve liquidity.

But it’s an even better fit for me than I expected. Journalists are ideally suited to the medium. What we do best is collect data, sift it, digest it, determine what’s important and bring it to light succinctly and credibly. Those are critical skills on the Web, key to the happy user experience. I really don’t see why journalistic values in general — and journalists in particular — shouldn’t be the predominant leaders of each and every sector of the Internet — with the possible exception of live chat rooms and pornography.

We’ve been awfully successful at washingtonpost. com, and I think that’s in large part because we’ve done online what so few newspapers do today. We’re cleaving to core newspaper values. We’re trustworthy. We provide depth and context. We exercise careful and responsible news judgment. We don’t let trends sway our good sense. We don’t let advertisers affect our coverage. We evolve and change — heck, it’s a new medium — while always holding fast to our roots. Sure, we use focus groups — but not to tell us what to do, just how to do it better.

We fight to be first, but not at all costs. If an AP story quotes anonymous sources, for instance, we’ll get confirmation from The Post newsroom before putting anything on our home page. And when we break news, our sourcing standards are as high as the paper’s. For instance, our midmorning scoop on Linda Chavez pulling out as a nominee for Secretary of Labor wasn’t based on speculation from anonymous officials. It was based on a Post reporter’s phone conversation with Chavez.

Though we want to be fun, we won’t pander. One example: We don’t do phony- baloney online "polls" which readers could mistake for a genuine public opinion survey.

For a modern journalist, the Web has so many beguiling attractions. Not just the endless news hole, but eternal shelf life. In fact, my favorite thing about the Net is not the interactivity or the immediacy, but the ability to provide context and let readers explore more. It’s amazing sometimes how "daily" even the great daily newspapers are, often at the expense of the big picture.

By writing our own primers, and mining the archives, and letting readers interact with newsmakers, and even shooting short video documentaries, we can add so much to the incremental news stories we Web- publish each night.

And the horizons are not narrowing. They are expanding.

The only thing that’s consistently frustrating about new media is the technology. It’s in its infancy, and it’s balky and unreliable. But otherwise, it’s a welcoming place to work.

And here’s another difference between this job and my old jobs. I like to think that in temperament I hearken back to the golden years of journalism. I’m a bit of an iconoclast. An activist. A boat-rocker. Your average modern newspaper manager finds people like me interesting mostly for target practice.

But in this industry — or at least at this company — I have found a place that actually values my energy and my passion. In fact, they promoted me. Go figure.

Dan Froomkin, ’96, was named editor of washingtonpost.com in November. Washingtonpost.com recently won five top honors at the 2001 EPpy Awards, sponsored by Editor and Publisher Interactive.

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Case #2: New Web Publication by Deborah Caldwell ’94

I never planned to be an Internet journalist.

I loved my newspaper job. I was doing interesting stories, I was writing at a good pace and I liked the people I worked with. I didn’t particularly want to throw my reporting career overboard for a dot-com. But I did it, anyway.

In September 1999, I left my job covering religion at the Dallas Morning News to join an Internet start-up called Beliefnet, a company with an ambitious plan. Beliefnet was formed with the goal of becoming the largest commercial, multi- faith Web site on the Internet. More than a year later, we have apparently succeeded. Our funky site, devoted to a somewhat unusual topic, is providing religion and spirituality content to America Online and Yahoo, our founder was featured on Good Morning America in October and in Time in December, and visitors to the site each month are now counted in the millions.

It has been intense, exhausting, and exhilarating. The last 18 months have included working nearly around the clock for several long months (including one night when I stayed up until 4 a.m.) and moving my family from Dallas to New York.

Jumping to a news organization that is less established than a newspaper was, and still is, a gamble. But it was a carefully calculated gamble, and as I look back over my journey into the second phase of my journalism career, none of the steps seemed particularly treacherous.

One day in early 1999 I heard about a man trying to start a religion and spirituality magazine called Belief. I thought it might be a good freelance opportunity, so I e-mailed Beliefnet’s founder, Steve Waldman, a former Newsweek writer and U. S. News and World Report editor, and told him to contact me when he got it running. At the time, about the only activity I did on the Internet was shop for sweaters at Landsend. com, and conduct reporting research. I decided if I was going to make a career decision, I’d better start surfing. That’s when I discovered how much I loved the Web.

Eventually I concluded that the Internet is changing how we get information, shop, listen to music, and build community — and despite the stock-- market volatility of the last few months, the Internet isn’t going away. If I, a thirtysomething suburban mom, could get so quickly interested, then I knew the same was true for young people as well.

A couple of months after we started e-mailing, Waldman learned that investors were far more interested in a Web site than a magazine. Soon after that, they handed him $5. 5-million, which, I learned, is significant first-round venture capital money. And a month or two later, he offered me a job. I took it, but not before researching my future boss. I checked his references the same week he was checking mine — and concluded he was smart, creative, and had a great business plan.

People sometimes ask: Is what we do on the Web really journalism? In the most basic sense, Internet journalism is identical to print journalism because it is text- based. Every day, we write and edit articles, dream up headlines, and choose photographs to accompany those articles. We strive to be fair, accurate, creative, and on the cutting edge. We have a daily news meeting. My office looks and feels like a newsroom.

But journalism on the Web is different in that I have many more tools at my disposal than words and pictures to tell a story. And this is what I love about it most.

For every column or article we post, we invite users to react instantly on a discussion board. People love this feature, and we love getting the feedback. It also helps us see when a particular feature is popular and, alas, when no one cares.

We also write polls to accompany our stories. In March, for instance, we posted numerous stories on the Islamic group Taliban, and its destruction of ancient Buddha statues in Afghanistan. On the Islam page, we posted a poll: What do you think of what the Taliban is doing? The possible answers were: 1) They were right. The statues are idols and must be destroyed; 2) Although righteous, the Taliban should not have done something that might endanger Muslims in non- Muslim countries; or 3) They had no right to do it; Muslims should respect other faiths. During the first week the poll appeared, the first answer was, inexplicably, the runaway favorite. (Eventually, the third answer won.)

We’ve written quizzes on “What’s Your Spiritual Type?” as well as “What Kind of Jew Are You?” “Are You a Gossip?” and “What is Your Aryuvedic Type?” We can also do artistic work. At Easter, two of my colleagues put together an online guided meditation on the “Way of the Cross” that included video and music. .

Some of this will strike journalists as alarmingly not journalistic. I can’t argue with that. Though I did not write the quiz on "God in the Movies" or put together the breathing exercise meditation, or dream up the Feng Shui game, I am enthusiastically in favor of including them on our site. I view these features as our version of the comics or the horoscope.

Probably the biggest difference between what we do and what traditional print journalists do is the interactivity between us and what we call our "users."

Every day, they sound off on our discussion boards, take our quizzes and polls, and create virtual prayer circles. We know what they like. We know what they hate. We know what they don’t care about. All because they can easily point, click, and push the "send" button.

Sometimes the constant change in a new company is exhausting. Everything is new, down to how freelancers get paid and what kinds of notepads get ordered at the office. I have never worked so hard. But we are, with the help of our readers, creating community — in addition to making good journalism.

Deborah Caldwell,’94, is religion producer at Beliefnet.com.

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Case #3: “e-Pub” Start-up by Mike Brennanl ’93

It used to be that reporters wanted to publish a novel that would propel them from the newsroom to wealthy, self- employed bliss. The dream today for some journalists — well, at least for me — is to become an Internet publisher. Now I’m making my dream come true.

More than a year ago, I left the Detroit Free Press, where I covered business and technology news, to start Michigan Technology News.Com (mitechnews.com) , an Internet-only “e-Pub” focused on giving Michigan businesses, particularly small entrepreneurial technology businesses, the coverage they were not getting anywhere else. To borrow a phrase from the Grateful Dead, “It’s been a long, strange ride. ”

Granted, I already knew how to report and write a story. I’d been doing it for nearly two decades. I’d also been covering technology since 1981, so I knew the issues, the people, the technologies used worldwide. It was the other business skills that needed some work.

Starting a business, I learned, means that you must sell, manage, make decisions, work, and keep the books. If you don’t have some of these skills, you buy them. If you can’t afford to buy them, you partner to get them. You adapt, remain flexible, and always keep an eye out for new deals you can forge, new alliances you can make, and new sources of revenue you can tap. In short, you become a hustler.

There will be days when nothing seems to go right. When all your plans seem to fail. When you can’t get your business partners to meet the deadlines we journalists consider second nature. It means you have to be patient, or in my case, develop a lot of patience. Nothing in business works out quite like you predict in your business plan. And in the fast-moving dot-com world, that business plan is good for about 90 days, what most experts now call an Internet year. Someone comes up with a new killer application that forces the rest of us to adapt. Failure to adapt usually means failure, period.

You’re also constantly struggling with cash flow, the killer of young businesses. Your suppliers know you’re just starting out. They demand cash up front, before delivery. But the folks who owe you money, most of whom have financial problems of their own, won’t pay you when they are supposed to, making it very difficult to pay your bills on time.

The other part of the business equation is timing. To create a successful business, whether it’s a dot-com or a traditional brick and mortar operation, you have to hit the market window perfectly. You can’t be too soon or too late or your chances of success are reduced dramatically. I hit the market window perfectly from a product standpoint. No other publication in Michigan offered the technology business coverage statewide that mine did. Unfortunately, from an investment point of view, my timing couldn’t have been worse. I launched Michigan Technology News.Com in April 2000, the same month Wall Street soured on dot-coms.

Three times since the site’s launch potential investors have wooed me, then backed away after they were unable to secure the financing they assured me was in hand. I’ve had to augment my own funds with money I could raise from selling advertising and sponsorships. I’ve had to learn to make a dollar stretch until the next bill is paid. Twelve months into this project, I’m not only still in business but profitable. Not many other dot-coms can say that.

I’ve learned a lot in the past year about what works in online publishing and what doesn’t. Forget about everything you’ve learned in the newspaper business. Except for The Wall Street Journal, subscriptions simply are not a realistic revenue model in the online world, where most people are used to getting their news free. Don’t count on selling a lot of ads either, until you can show potential advertisers you have either access to a unique vertical audience (like technology business professionals) or a huge number of unique visitors each month, typically 500, 000 or more. You have to have an incredible news product to attract that kind of traffic.

Or you need a site, like Michigan Technology News.Com, that not only offers technology news unavailable elsewhere, but also referrals to products and services needed by technology entrepreneurs. We’re getting about 10, 000 visitors a month to the site, a number I hope to triple by the summer, in part by offering a variety of new products, such as audio Web casting and a wireless news service.

If I haven’t scared you off yet, then do it. Becoming a dot-com publisher is anything but boring. And once you get a taste of the entrepreneur’s life, you can never return to the corporate newsroom and enjoy it.

Mike Brennan, ’93, is founder, publisher, and editor of Michigan Technology News.Com.