Chapter 1

Logging on to the web

Major themes

• The web is a news medium in the sense that all web sites require new information to keep visitors coming back.
  
  
• As a medium, the web is neither print nor broadcast; it contains characteristics of both, but it is quite different when considered on its own.
  
  
• The web is destined to change journalism, particularly in its newsgathering and presentation functions.
  
  
• The most profound change the web offers to journalism is its quality of interactivity and the possibility of changing the relationship between the journalist and the audience.
  
  

     Slate.com sprang forth onto the World Wide Web in 1996 as Microsoft’s hip, cheeky contribution to web journalism. Six years later the web magazine (webzine, e-zine) was still hip and cheeky, although a little chastened by its brief and unsuccessful iteration as a subscription publication in a world of free content. Rather than just writing about the bankruptcy of Enron and the subsequent fallout, Slate developed the Enron Blame Game in February, 2002, shortly after the bankruptcy had been announced. The “game” consisted of a graphic that looked like a game board with pictures and icons. A reader could click on any part of the board and find out whom that person was blaming for the bankruptcy or what was being blamed for it. Despite its journalism-with-attitude demeanor, the graphic contained a lot of information and made the point that no one really knew very much about why Enron had failed. (http://slate.msn.com/?id=2061470)

* * *

     Glenn Reynolds, an energetic University of Tennessee law professor, has established a web log (a web site that allows him to easily post his opinions and accept and post entries from others – see chapter 2) called Instapundit (http://www.instapundit.com/). He updates this site with his opinions and information throughout the day. The writing is short, lively and provocative. His entries and the ones he posts contain lots of links that take readers to other sites. Reynolds (as of August 2002, a year after the site began) averages 27,000 visitors a day – more than the daily circulation of most newspapers in the United States.

* * *

     On the evening of September 11, 2001, a college student in Florida had not heard from friends in New York. Unable to do much else, she stayed up until early the next morning teaching herself Flash and building a tribute to the victims of the attacks. She took images from a number of news and commercial web sites, including ABCNews.com, and downloaded Ray Charles' version of "America the Beautiful." She posted the presentation on her web site, emailed a few friends and went to bed. Within a few days, the site received 93,000 in a single day. During the month of September, she had 2.6 million visitors. (http://doubtlessdesigns.net/godblessamerica.html)

* * *

     As George W. Bush prepared for the State of the Union speech in January 2002, the Christian Science Monitor web site editors thought it would be a good idea to give their readers a shot at writing their own State of the Union address. They set up an interactive section called "My Fellow Americans" that let readers select ideas and phrases they would include in the speech. The section also gave readers information about what makes a good speech and had a discussion forum where readers could post their own speech or discuss Bush's speech.

(http://www.csmonitor.com/specials/myFellowAmericans/greatessay.html)

* * *

     MSNBC.com did not just tell its readers about the new strike zone that Major League Baseball was demanding that its umpires followed. The site set up an interactive presentation that show readers the effects of the new zone compared to the old one. (http://www.msnbc.com/modules/ifront/default.asp?0ql=cmp)

* * *

     What is all this? Journalism?

     Some of it is, some of it isn’t – at least not journalism in the traditional sense. Just what is journalism on the web? That may be the biggest question that journalism itself will have to answer in the first decade of the twenty-first century.

     But the examples above (and hundreds of thousands of others) occurred because the World Wide Web exists. They could not have happened, for technical or cultural reasons, in the traditional media of newspapers, magazines, and television and radio broadcasting.

     And just over a decade ago, the web didn’t exist.

What is the World Wide Web?

     The development of the World Wide Web had little to do with journalism but a lot to do with news and information.

     Two threads of creativity and problem solving – each as old as human intelligence – merged in the early 1990s to form the World Wide Web. Each thread had a tradition, a set of important personalities and contributors, and an approach. Each thread intersected and intertwined itself through the other in ways that ultimately helped to develop the communication system that we have today.

     One thread was what we might call literary-scientific. The basic “problem” was the volume of human knowledge. The first half of the twentieth century witnessed a vast expansion of knowledge (information, ideas, technology), much of it wrought from a desire to win in warfare. At the end of World War II, Vannevar Bush, a scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, published seminal article in the Atlantic Monthly on this problem.

There is a growing mountain of research. But there is increased evidence that we are being bogged down today as specialization extends. The investigator is staggered by the findings and conclusions of thousands of other workers - conclusions which he cannot find time to grasp, much less to remember, as they appear.

Bush thought photography and compression might be the answer – taking pictures of documents and then reducing them so that a set of encyclopedia could fit into a match box. The cards on which these pictures would reside (microfiche) could then be read on some machine that would help the scientist in remembering the associations and threats of thinking. Bush’s solution to the problem had some validity for a while, but it was his articulation of the problem itself and his ideas about sharing and linking that became important.

     What Bush was beginning to envision was hypertext, a name later coined by Ted Nelson. In the 1960s Nelson conceived of a universe of documents, called a “docuverse,” where documents would exist and be shared for a small fee. He called this docuverse Xanadu, the precursor of the World Wide Web that we know today. Although Nelson is given great credit for his vision, he remains openly dissatisfied with the web (see sidebar on page --) and is still pushing for a radical reformation that includes his original ideas.

     The second thread was technological, and there were two “problems” that needed to be solved here. One was communicating over long distances, a problem that had existed from the time that individuals realized people lived beyond a day’s walk. The other was a much more current problem. In the post World War II nuclear age, the U.S. Department of Defense was fearful that a single, well-placed nuclear blast would eliminate the ability of the United States to communicate and defend itself. In the 1960s, the department’s Advanced Research Project Agency (APRA) began developing an information distribution system that would not be knocked out with one blow.

     The product of ARPA’s work was a series of connected computers and computer networks called the Internet that was first instituted in 1969. Slowly and somewhat fitfully through the 1970s and 1980s, protocols for transferring information – email, online research tools and information and even discussions groups – were formed.

     In 1991, Tim Berners-Lee, a physicist working for a European research consortium in Switzerland, developed a hypertext system to allow people to share what they had through the Internet. It required a software program to be installed on an individual computer, and the information to be shared had to be formatted with a set of tags (hypertext markup language, or HTML). The browser that would allow all this to happen was called WorldWideWeb. More sophisticated browsers were later developed by others, but the name and the system that Berners-Lee donated to the world (he has never made any money off his work) stuck.

     The work of Berners-Lee and others took the Internet – previously confined to computer geeks and computer bulletin board users – and placed it into the hands of the general public.

     And the public ran away with it.

Getting connected

     By the beginning of the 21^st century, there were millions of web sites and web pages (collections of text and images) that represented individual people, organizations, companies, governments, and ideas. A survey by U.S. Department of Commerce in September 2001 found that more than half the population was using the Internet, and the number of users was growing by about two million people per month. If this growth were to continue, by 2004 more than 75 percent of the nation would be using the Internet.

     The Commerce Department report also said that 90 percent of children from ages 5 to 17 used computers, and 75 percent of 14-17 year olds were on the Internet at some point in their lives. In addition, 45 percent of the entire population used email (up from 35 percent in the previous year), and 36 percent used the Internet to search for product and service information, such as finding airline schedules and buying books online.

     But in its short life (about 10 years at the time this is written), the web has changed. The web is certainly bigger, with more sites and more information. It is also technically easier to browse, or surf, and to find information. New design tools have made web sites easier to create and have allowed users increased ease in navigation. People who design and produce web sites have also become more sophisticated in presenting information and more adept at knowing why people visited a web site.

     The biggest change, however, has been our attitude toward the web.

     Initially, the web was a curiosity and a good place to hang out. Many portals, and many web sites themselves, used to tout what they called the “cool site of the day.” These would be the sites that web producers thought users would enjoy because of graphics, animation or clever organization. It did not matter that the subject of the site (e.g., Mama Jewel’s Restaurant or the Bureau of Indian Affairs) did not interest the visitor. Rather, the visitor should go to the site just to check out the cool goings-on.

     No more.

     The web is now a place where people do things. They don't just hang out. One of the chief web activities is getting information. People want airline schedules, recipes, Sunday school lessons, wedding registrations, the bestseller list, the latest prices on new computers – a wide variety of information that has one thing in common. It must be current.

     That is why, above all else, the web is a news medium.

     People who surf the web know this instinctively. They race around the web landing here and there, always in search of the latest information about whatever topic is of interest to them at that moment. Much of this activity is driven by current news events, as we saw at the beginning of this chapter. News drives the web. The coming of spring, for instance, brings with it March Madness – the NCAA basketball tournament – and sports fans are after the latest information. That’s why web sites such as SportsLine.com had an increase of 36 percent in its traffic (1.4 million visitors) during the first week of March 2002 when March Madness had barely begun. ESPN.com had an 11 percent increase (3.4 million visitors) and SportingNews.com had a 21 percent increase (440,000 visitors) during that same period.

     People want news, and they want it immediately. Even when the information is not “breaking news,” they expect the web sites they visit to be different whenever they show up. People rarely return to a web site if they keep seeing the same information. Web site producers quickly realize this, even though they may have begun their site with the idea that they could put it up and leave it alone. Web sites are not billboards. In order to maintain and increase their traffic, they must be changed often. The monster, as many webbies have found, must be fed.

     This is, of course, what news organizations do, and this is why the web is a news medium.

What’s different about the web?

     The essence of the web is news, but the web is not a newspaper on a computer screen. Nor is it a broadcast station that you can pick up through a browser. It is different from traditional media in some significant and profound ways.

     Capacity. A newspaper reporter might be confined to writing 500 or 600 words for a story. A photographer might spend all day covering an event and expect to have only one picture in print. A graphics journalist might get a one- or two-column space. At a broadcast station, a reporter would have only 40 seconds to tell a story, and a five-minute statement from a news source would have to be reduced to a seven-second sound bite. All of these journalists experience the two great frustrations of professional journalism – the lack of time and space.

     The web greatly mitigates, if not eliminates entirely, these limitations. A reporter can take as many words or as much time as is necessary to tell the story. A photographer can post 10 pictures of an event, not just one. A graphics journalist might be limited by screen width (around 10 inches or so), but even this limitation represents a vast expansion of the space he or she is normally allotted.

     With the web news reporters can include with their reports the full text of speeches they cover; biographical information on their sources; maps, charts and pictures that help expand the reader’s understanding of the subject. They can include audio of the sources and video of the scenes where the story took place.

     To be sure, there are limitations. Servers, the computers where information for web sites is stored, do have a finite capacity for holding information, but generally it takes a long time before those limits are reached. More practically, the limitations of the web have to do with the size of the screen that visitors are using, the time it takes to load the information onto the visitor’s screen, and the time and effort the reporter wants to spend (and the news organization is willing to support) in gathering the information.

     The web offers more possibilities for presenting more information in more ways than either print or broadcasting.

     Flexibility. The web can handle a wide variety of forms for the information it presents – words, pictures, audio, video, and graphics. In this regard, it is far more flexible than print or broadcast.

     This book explores some of the ways that these forms are being used by web journalists, and in some places it speculates on how these forms might develop. The relative newness of the web as a medium, however, means that many of these forms have not been fully explored and there is a great deal of room for imagination and creativity on the part of people who enter this field. For instance, the New York Times, like many other news organizations with substantial web sites, regularly produces picture galleries of photos that the paper’s far-flung set of photographers have taken. On many of these galleries, not only can visitors see the pictures and read the cutline text, they can hear an audio of the photographer talking about his or her work.

     The audio picture gallery is a new form of presenting information that the web has spawned. There are many other forms waiting to be created and developed by imaginative journalists.

     Those who enter the field of web journalism are joining a profession where traditional walls are being eliminated. The journalist who says, “I am a word person” or “I am a photographer” or “I am a graphic artist” runs the risk of severely limiting his or her capacity to take advantage of the many forms the web offers. No doubt, there will be specialists – people whose main job is to write or to shoot video or research and produce charts and graphs. But entry level web journalists will be asked to do it all, and veterans will be required to think about their information and decide how it can best be presented to viewers.

     Immediacy. The web can deliver information immediately, often as events are unfolding. Broadcasting, particularly television, can do the same thing and with great impact, as many of us experienced on September 11, 2001. But the web’s qualities offer an immediacy that broadcasting cannot match in four important ways.

     The first is variety. Most major breaking news events are multifaceted. That is, they involve a variety of people, places and activities. The terrorist attacks of September 11 are a dramatic case in point; many things were happening to many in a variety of locations. At the same time the towers in New York were collapsing, a plane was crashing into the Pentagon, and the government was shutting down air traffic across the country. Locally, school systems and government offices were deciding whether or not to remain open. A mother wondering if she would have to pick up her child at school that day would probably could not have found that information on television.  But a good local news organization could have put that information on its web site so that it could be accessed immediately. Many sites did just that.

     In a less dramatic vein, let’s say you want to know the score of a sporting event. How likely are you to find that out immediately when you turn on the television or radio? Even if you are looking at ESPN’s scores rolling across the bottom of the screen, you are probably not going to see the score you are interested in immediately. You can find that information far more quickly on ESPN’s web site (as well as many other sports-oriented sites).

     The second quality of the web’s immediacy is expansion. As noted earlier, the web has a huge capacity to hold and display information. For instance, in any major disaster story the names of victims are important and of interest to many people. Yet those names rarely make it onto a televised news broadcast. Limited by a finite amount of time, television could not be expected to fill the information needs of the viewers about a major breaking news story. Television generally only shows us and tells us one thing at a time. (Split screens give television the capacity to show more than one picture at a time, but they are rarely used.) It may or may not be what we are interested in or what we want to know.

     The web can often satisfy our need for information more immediately. It can provide a variety of information that viewers can select. One may want the names of victims; another may want background about the disaster; another may want the latest developments; and so on. A good news web site can provide all of these things so that readers can choose.

     Depth, the third part of the immediacy characteristic of the web, is closely akin to capacity, but what we are really talking about here is quality. Information can be posted immediately on a web site, but to get it ready, it must undergo at least minimal editing. The broadcasts of a breaking news event, though often done by people who are thoroughly professional, have no buffer between their creation and their distribution. Because the web is essentially a word medium (see Chapter 5 on writing for the web), web journalists have some opportunity to edit their work or to let others look at it before it is disseminated.

     Finally, the web can offer immediacy with context, something broadcasters find difficult to provide with their breaking news stories. The limitations of television to provide context are evident in the live coverage of many events. Take golf matches, for instance. The camera and announcers may concentrate on a single player or a single shot while a graphic overlays part of the screen showing the leader board. Still, those two things may not tell the whole story of the match because other important actions may be occurring in different parts of the course (or even off the course). Watching a golf match on television is undoubtedly dramatic for those interested in the sport, but television has difficulty giving a complete picture until the match is finished. The web has the power to summarize and update, while adding information in various parts of the coverage.

     Permanence. Describing the web as a permanent medium may seem silly to someone who has worked for hours on a document only to erase it with a single keystroke. Or to someone who tries to find a news story on a newspaper's web site that is more than a few days old. In these instances, the web can seem almost as ethereal as broadcasting.

     Yet, the web is the most permanent of media in the sense that it does not deteriorate. Nothing need be lost. Properly archived and maintained, data on the web – because of its electronic form -- can exist far beyond any tangible medium we now have. This permanence is an often overlooked quality of the web, but it is one that gives the medium great power. Paper deteriorates, and videotape and audiotape degrades. Information on the web, however, stays put unless someone makes it go away.

     It has taken us some time to recognize the permanency of the web and to put that permanency to good use. Web sites have been abandoned, addresses have changed and data have been over-written without being properly saved. Much that has been created during the first decade of the web has been lost, but those losses are not due to a failure of the medium. Rather, they are failures of the operators.

     This permanency leads to two other qualities about the web that render it so powerful: duplication and retrievability. Because the web is such an open medium and because the technology that creates a web site is shared, any part of a web site (or the whole web site itself) can be duplicated and stored in a different location from where it originated.

     Duplication renders information on the web safe because it can be stored in various places; retrievability renders it powerful, particularly in the area of web journalism. A simple example of this characteristic is the murder that is thoroughly covered by the local press. Six months later, someone is arrested and accused. Six months after that the trial begins. A reporter covering the trial may be new to the news organization, but he or she can easily retrieve what has been written before to become informed about the background of the story. Stories about the trial will probably have at least a paragraph or two of background material, but they can also contain links to earlier stories that will allow readers to gain insight into the case. Journalism is sometimes criticized because of its episodic coverage and lack of context. Retrieving previous stories for the reader is just one way that a single article can be shown to be part of a continuing story over days, months and years.

     Interactivity. All of the qualities of the web listed above (capacity, immediacy, flexibility and permanence) have the potential of changing journalism as it is practiced on the web, but those qualities pale against the potential the web has for interactivity. This quality portends a new relationship between journalist and reader/viewer/consumer, and that new relationship could mean a new form of journalism.

     All news media are interactive to some extent, of course. Television viewers and radio listeners must turn their sets on and select channels. Remote controls allow users to switch between channels at will. Beyond that, however, these media offer no opportunities to interact. They provide no choices and no feedback loops while programs are being broadcast.

     Newspapers and magazines are more interactive in the sense that readers can choose what parts to read and what to ignore. Headlines, refers (text that directs readers to another part of the paper), layouts and sectioning help readers make these choices. But print media offer no channel through which readers can respond to what they are seeing and to interact with the journalists who have produced the publication – except in an entirely separate medium and context (such as mail or the telephone).

     Web journalism offers the same choices that print media offer, only more of them. Whereas the choices in newspapers are pages and headlines, the choices on the web can be built into the articles and web pages themselves with hyperlinks. These allow readers to veer off within a story to information that is most interesting or relevant to them. An array of choices gives readers more control over what they see and read, and it heightens the non-linearity of the web itself.

     Where the web is really different, however, is the immediate feedback channel that it offers to users and journalists alike. News web sites have only begun to explore the techniques for channeling this feedback, using techniques such as instant polls, email, forums, bulletin boards, discussion groups, and online chats with reporters, editors and sources themselves. These channels can be immediate and active, and as web journalism develops, they will become an increasingly important part of the journalist’s milieu.

     This new relationship will have profound effects on the way journalists gather information and make decisions. Readers are likely to become sources of information and lead journalists to new inquiries and stories. They could provide valuable perspective to journalists who are new to a story or not part of the community they cover (two of the major criticism of journalists today), offering points of view that journalists would not normally hear in talking with “official” sources about their stories (see chapter 4). The public journalism movement (often called civic journalism), which seeks to involve the community in journalistic decision-making, could be taken to a new levels with the web.

     The other side of interactivity is that while the audience can reach toward the news organization, the news organization can find out more about the audience. An organization may ask or require that users register to see its site. (The New York Times does this and gains valuable data on who is looking at its site.) But the technology of the web allows those who run web sites to be less intrusive in finding out information about their visitors. Data can be gathered on where hits are coming from – both from individual computers and the URLs immediately before the hit. The web site can also track a user’s progress through the site even to the point of seeing how long the user spends looking at a particular page. Developing email lists, bulletin boards and forums is yet another way of gathering information about users.

     With these and other methods, it is very easy for an organization to see what the most popular parts (and least popular parts) of a web site are and to make editorial and advertising rate decisions accordingly. Few news organizations have gone that far yet, but they inevitably will do so. Such data will allow news organizations to develop content to better serve general and specialized audiences.

     These characteristics – capacity, immediacy, flexibility, permanence and interactivity – set the web apart from traditional media. They will be the continuing themes that will be developed in the subsequent chapters of this book.

Disadvantages of the web

     The previous section set out in some detail the characteristics of the web that in general seem to suggest the web has advantages as a news medium over print and broadcast. In general, this is so, but the web still has major disadvantages that those interested in developing web journalism must acknowledge.

     The first of these disadvantages is that the web is expensive for users. Even if an individual does not have to pay the costs personally, an organization must buy a computer and establish an Internet connection, and neither of these things is free.

     Secondly, the web is stationary and awkward. The old saw of “I can’t take it into the bathroom with me” still holds true for most people, despite the availability of portable computers and wireless connections. Newspapers, magazines and books are much more convenient to use than the web, and they undoubtedly will remain so, at least for a while.

     Finally, from the users’ point of view, the web can be confusing and frustrating. The multiplicity of voices that the web has spawned makes selection difficult, and finding precisely the information you want can be mind-numbing. Many web sites are not well organized or well designed. They do not give users what they promise, and they cannot sustain the demands of keeping content fresh or current.

     On the part of the web producer, the major disadvantage of the web is that it is simply not print or broadcast; that is, it is not an established medium, and relatively few people have the “web habit.” While that is changing, news web site producers must contend with the fact that the business models that ensure profitability have still not been developed and tested. This disadvantage is currently exacerbated by the expectation from users that they do not (and should not) pay directly for the content they receive from a site. It is unlikely that free content will continue to be the norm. While web sites are relatively inexpensive to establish and post, good content is costly, and eventually the users will have to pay. (For a more complete discussion of this issue, see chapter 11.)

Whither web journalism?

     Despite its current lack of profitability, the web has too many advantages and is too well established as a part of people’s lives to fall into disuse. The web will be in our future, and as such it is likely to fundamentally alter the way journalism is practiced.

     The development of web journalism will allow, if not force, journalists to examine some basic questions about how we gather, process and distribute information, and what our relationship with the audience is. The journalist process itself is unlikely to shift dramatically as we enter this new medium. The culture of journalism is that we tell ourselves about ourselves; we try to do so with accuracy and grace and with the least harm, but we know that sometimes harm or discomfort will be the result.

     How we do what we do is the question that is fascinating many web journalists in this era. The web offers many possibilities and permutations on those possibilities, and anyone with energy, imagination and a sense of adventure will enjoy the web environment for the next decade. New forms of storytelling and information presentation will be developed. Some will be discarded, and some will remain and mature. Watching and participating in this process will be fun.

     The last question – the relationship of journalists with their audience – will probably be the most vexing and ultimately the most important one of all. How do we give the audience what it needs when there will be increased pressures to give the audience only what it wants? What kind of a dialogue should we develop with the audience, and when and how should the audience participate in the journalistic process? What standards of accountability will both journalists and the audience accept? Finally, how will web journalism achieve the ultimate goal of the journalist – to tell ourselves about ourselves in order to build a healthier community of people?

     The journey of web journalism is just beginning, and the purpose of this book is to deal with many of these questions.

Discussion and activities

1.    The author speaks glowingly of the characteristics of the web that distinguish it from other media. These are capacity, immediacy, permanence, flexibility and interactivity. Is there a downside to these qualities for journalism?

2.    What is the future for newspaper journalism? Television journalism?

3.    What web sites do you visit most often? Why? Try to list some categories for your personal use, and then list web sites under them.

4.    Imagine yourself as a web journalist? What would you like to be doing in five years? Ten years?

References

Beck, Margery. “Warren Buffet see problems for newspaper industry.” Associated Press, April 30, 2001.

EPN World Reporter. “Scrapheap Beckons for Trad Journalists?” August 5, 2002. http://www.epnworld-reporter.com/news/fullstory.php/aid/374

Farkas, David K and Jean B. Farkas, Principles of Web Design, Allyn and Bacon, 2002.

Gates, Dominic. “Newspapers in the Digital Age.” Online Journalism Review, May 5, 2002. http://www.ojr.org/future/p1020298748.php

Langfield, Amy. “Democratizing Journalism.” Online Journalism Review, April 3, 2002. http://www.ojr.org/technology/1017872659.php

Lasica, J.D. “Net Gain: Journalism’s Challenges in an Interactive Age.” American Journalism Review, November 1996. http://www.ajr.org/Article.asp?id=2217. (This remarkable series of articles was written in thee early days of the web and foresaw, with striking clarity, the importance of the interactive characteristic of the web to journalism.)

Lasica, J.D. “Internet Journalism and the Starr Investigation.” http://www.well.com/user/jd/starr.html, January 20, 2000.

Rogers, Michael. “Can the Internet Save News?” Newsweek, March 2002. http://www.msnbc.com/news/719816asp?cpl=1.

Rosenberg, Scott. “The media titans still don’t get it.” Salon.com. August 13, 2002. http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2002/08/13/media_titans/print.html.

Shapiro, Andrew. “The Drudge Factor.” Mediachannel.org. (undated). http://www.mediachannel.org/original/shapiro-druge.shtml

U.S. Department of Commerce, National Telecommunication and Information Administration. “A Nation Online: How Americans Are Expanding Their Use of the Internet.” February, 2002. http://www.ntia.doc.gov/ntiahome/dn/index.html

Web sites

Online Journalism Review (http://www.ojr.org)

This site is a must-visit-regularly spot for those interested in journalism on the web. Larry Pryor, executive editor of Online Journalism Review, writes of the site that he oversees: "As a journalism review based online, we are committed to covering the  full range of journalistic issues in all media, but with a particular emphasis on the Internet. Since our March 1, 1998, launch, we have devoted most of our resources to evaluating the emerging field of online journalism, providing readers commentary, monthly features and Web resource databases. Our purpose is to be useful to journalists and anyone interested in where journalism is going in cyberspace."

Poynter Institute (http://www.poynter.org)

"The Poynter Institute is a school for journalists, future journalists, and teachers of journalism," in the words of its web site. "Our students come here in a search for excellence. Our teachers provide focused instruction and personal support in that quest." The web site is full of interesting articles on all phases of journalism, particularly online journalism.

W3 Consortium (http://www.w3.org/)

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)  describes itself as a site that "develops interoperable technologies (specifications, guidelines, software, and tools) to lead the Web to its full potential. W3C is a forum for information, commerce, communication, and collective understanding."

Jakob Neilson (http://www.useit.com)

Neilson is a guru of web writing and usability. His ideas are sometimes controversial, but he holds strong opinions that cannot be ignored. He describes the site simply as "usable information technology."

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