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Leaving the Online by D. Ian Hopper After spending three years as an online journalist in the land of pool tables, casual dress and free soft drinks, I’m back to getting printer’s ink on my fingers — but still destroying my eyesight. Even at the age of 27, I’ve served in the online operations of two large-circulation newspapers and the second-largest Internet news site. And believe me, that’s plenty. Why did I bug out? Fame, fortune and hard-core news. No, really. To begin with, online news operations aren’t the golden calfs other dot-coms are, or at least used to be a few months ago. Several years ago, new media managers squeezed a few pennies out of the pockets of media execs with the promise that when ‘this Internet thing takes off,” the bucks will really roll in. That hasn’t happened yet, but Amazon and its Man of the Year CEO haven’t managed to pull it off either. Still, it makes a difference. When the online news grunts see half-hearted promotions, lame content, the ever-present shovelware and, worst of all, “e-commerce partnerships’ (a.k.a. Deals With the Devil), one has to assume that there are execs on the top floor thinking in the back of their heads that this Internet thing is going to destroy their baby — papers or TV. Which brings us to the next problem: content. Even the fact that they don’t call it ’stories’ or “articles’ says it all. It’s just “content,” as if it comes in a box surrounded by Styrofoam peanuts. It begins to feel as if it’s assembled by children in Indonesia. It’s tough for online news grunts to have pride in something that they write little Perl scripts to shovel — hence the term "shovelware" — print articles online, or re-write a television script into, well, English to make it readable instead of watchable. Not that there isn’t any original online reporting. It just isn’t that good. Either it has a blatant bias, an overwhelming attitude, or, and this seems to be the most common, it’s completely at the whim of the reporter. Since most online organizations aren’t dedicated to producing their own reporting, it’s left to enterprising (or masochistic) reporters to write what they’re interested in, with no larger scope or editing process site-wide. (It should be said here that this is, of course, all personal and anecdotal evidence.) Finally, there’s the so-called digital divide. Millions of Americans are still without computers or Internet access, or they have no interest in getting their news from a 17-inch monitor. There’s an incremental divide, too. Even among the Internet users, many are still chugging along on 56K modems. It’s hard to market flashy sites or worse, TV-like video, to people who have to sit around and wait for it — or who are more likely to just walk over to their televisions and sit down. That’s not to say that these problems won’t be solved, eventually. I just lost the patience to wait. Meanwhile, I’m back to old media, represented by old, non-state-of-the-art computers and old white men. Back to people who defend strange and counter-intuitive traditions by repeating that they’re traditions. Back to newspapers that print once a day. On the plus side, people read newspapers and watch TV news. Media flacks respond to network initials and city papers a lot faster than blank.com. This doesn’t mean that I’m really leaving the online world, though. It’s a lot nicer to be the shovelee rather than the shoveler. Still, I kind of miss that free soda.
D. Ian Hopper is the national technology correspondent for the largest news organization in the world. To comment on this article, enter the Culture Clash section of the Pop Forum.
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