Coverage of Net Getting Up to Speed

In the early days of television, many newspapers tried to pretend it didn’t exist. Some even refused to publish daily television schedules for fear of giving free promotion to a potential competitor.

Although most newspapers also paid little attention to the Internet in its embryonic stage, they are no longer hiding their heads in the same journalistic sand. One reason is that an increasing number of print reporters use the Internet as a research tool.

Thirty percent of the country’s daily journalists now use the Internet regularly, according to a recent survey conducted for the American Society of Newspaper Editors. They communicate with sources by e-mail, pick up news tips in online forums and chat rooms and harvest information from Web sites and news groups around the world. Much of this information would previously have been unavailable or, at best, too costly or too difficult to find.

Thus sensitized to the value of the Net, the better papers now cover technological, financial and cultural developments in cyberspace thoroughly, with reporters who are knowledgeable about the subject.

Most papers list the e-mail addresses for their reporters and editors on their Web sites, and many put those addresses at the end of some stories in the printed edition as well. Some papers also publish notes at the end of stories in the printed edition directing readers to related stories on the paper’s Web site.

The Washington Post publishes a dozen or so “for more information” notices a day. The San Jose Mercury News prints numerical codes at the end of many short stories every day, referring readers to “the complete text” on the paper’s Web site. The paper also publishes on Page 2 every day a listing of its Web site highlights.

Online high-tech news services like C/NET generally provide the best coverage of the Internet--and often scoop their print rivals. But several print newspapers also do a good job covering cyberspace. The Mercury News, in the heart of the Silicon Valley, probably provides the most comprehensive coverage of the new technology, but the Wall Street Journal--which has devoted two full special sections (and portions of three others) to the Internet in the last year--publishes a page on “Net Interest” every other week and provides continuing coverage of the Internet on a daily basis.

The New York Times, a pioneer in coverage of cyberspace, continues to provide extensive reporting, both in its news and business pages. USA Today publishes stories on the Internet every week on its “High Tech” page, as does the Los Angeles Times in its weekly “Cutting Edge” business section. Many other papers have similar features, and most routinely publish Web-related news and features on at least an irregular basis.

This is not to say that the traditional media have embraced the Web with an open mind and a blind eye. In recent months, there have been several stories pointing out the number of Internet enterprises that have shut down or cut back, and there have been occasional (and overstated) stories on the dangers of the Web, most notably in the aftermath of the mass suicide by members of the Heaven’s Gate cult.

Early this year, the Los Angeles Times published a story that said online magazines “have become fixated more on scooping one another, even if by nanoseconds, than on getting the story right.” As it turned out, that Times story didn’t get it right.

The story accused C/NET of having “posted a scoop” that “wasn’t true” about a merger between Netscape and Novell. But C/NET had not said the merger was taking place; it had merely reported in one story that a respected financial news service and a respected technology research firm had both said Novell was a good takeover candidate and that Netscape was mentioned as a potential suitor.

The C/NET story said both companies denied any merger talks; a second C/NET story--a week later--again “refuted any notion that merger talks had been held between the two companies,” as Jai Singh, editor of cnetnews.com, later pointed out.

C/NET was recently judged by Editor & Publisher magazine to have the best online news service of any non-newspaper company and--justly proud of its reputation--Singh wrote The Times to say that the paper’s story had been “flatly wrong.” The Times published a correction conceding the point.

Most stories about the Internet have treated it as both a serious cultural phenomenon and a rapidly growing communications medium, though. Indeed, some have treated it as the invention of the wheel, the telephone and the television all rolled into one.

“Hype about the Internet is out of control,” says Nick Donatiello, president of Odyssey, a San Francisco-based research firm that specializes in information technology.