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.