All the News That Fits

Brandweek, Sept 4, 2000 by Verne Gay

Networks are giving people more news all the time on the Web, But are audiences ready to trade in remote for a mouse

The first thing you notice when you go to ABC News' vast Web site is, well, everything. Text stories. Links to shows such as Nightline. Streaming audio and video clips. Chat rooms. There's enough material there at any given time to fill 100--even 1,000--daily newspapers. But the eye invariably drifts to Exhibit A in the gathering revolution to bring fresh news content to the Web: a tiny picture of a man with ferret-like eyebrows and a mischievous grin which suggests he knows something you don't.

Click on samdonaldson@abenews.com--as several thousand devotees, mostly stationed in offices with high-speed Net access, do each weekday at lunchtime--and you may get lucky. Then again, you might have to work for it. Chances are good that Real Player (the media player ABCnews.com uses for streaming audio and video) will demand that additional plug-ins are needed. Chances are also good Real Player will not be able to provide them at just that moment. With persistence, you get past this hurdle and chances are even better the show will frequently be interrupted by buffering (the collection of data) and Internet congestion--a fancy term for a traffic jam.

Yes, it's much easier to turn on the TV set to watch Sam and Cokie on Sunday mornings. But maybe, just maybe, Sam does know something the rest of us don't. "I love it, I just love it," says Donaldson, talking about putting together a news show for the Web. As for the technical glitches, he has a response to that: "What would you have ABC News do?" he responded to a question lobbed by a reporter at the ABC Summer Press Tour. "Not try to go on the Web? Simply perish? I think our networks, if we don't find new mediums and highways, are dinosaurs." Donaldson has emerged--improbably--as the Web's biggest booster of TV-news-on-demand.

Samdonaldson@abcnews.com is, in fact, a groundbreaking Internet-only newscast; the first time a major network news anchor has fronted his own Web show, although colleagues like Chris Wallace and MSNBC's John Siegenthaler have also launched less ambitious efforts of their own. Even so, the Web site is hardly a ratings barnburner, and it's fair to ask: Will it ever be? Everyone agrees that if streaming video shows like this are beholden to the same God as their TV counterparts-- Nielsen--then they are in trouble.

PIONEERING SPIRIT

But proponents say that obsessing about the volume of site traffic misses the point entirely. You can't measure the future with a yardstick, and you certainly can't argue that what is there today will necessarily be there tomorrow. This is a medium in flux, they say, but one with perhaps more promise than anything since the invention of the printing press. Richard Glover, executive vice president, Internet Media at ABC, says, "Do we still have [technical] problems? Sure we do. Do I think that would scuttle what we're trying to do? Absolutely not."

Glover, Donaldson and others perfectly reflect the can-do pioneer spirit at places like ABCNews.com, CNN.com, MSNBC.com and CBSNews.com, four of the leaders of online TV news content, which arc battling for primacy in this nascent business. Despite a host of minor technical glitches and not-so-minor financial ones (numerous sites have had layoffs in recent months, including Disney's Go.com), there is now a feeling that the keys to the kingdom are within their grasp. Executives argue that they have a clearer idea of how people will use their sites and why they will use them. They also say they are rapidly folding in more content, which will make their sites even more compelling and indispensable. And they note that some technical advances--such as the introduction of Real Player 8 and Intel's new Pentium 4, as well as the expansion of broadband--will help eradicate the glitches.

Millions of people now use the Internet as their primary source of news. And during big news events people are starting to turn to the Internet for updates. According to Media Metrix, Web site usage at MSNBC.com increased 85 percent on July 25, the day the Concorde crashed in France, from the day before. And during the week of Aug. 13, when the Democratic convention was held in Los Angeles, traffic increased 9.8 percent, from 3.8 million unique visitors to 4.2 million.

It's certainly not the majority of people, but as usage grows and as broadband technology becomes the preferred method to access it, a thicket of questions arises: What, for example, will be the difference between network TV news provided by major networks such as ABC, CBS and NBC, and Internet TV news sites such as ABCnews.com and MSNBC.com? How will networks complement their Web news sites and vice versa, or will they ultimately become one in the same? The challenges this presents become apparent when someone like Glover contends that network shows such as World News Tonight will some day be available on the site in their entirety. What does this do to agreements with affiliates? What does it do to network and local ad rates? Why even have the Big Three TV news divisions at all?