Can internet "newspapers" be truly independent?
Published 05 June 2000
Media - Ian Hargreaves
While the excitable citizens of Planet Internet were lamenting the fate of boo.com, the online fashion retailer that collapsed two weeks ago, those of us with an interest in the future of journalism were more interested in the fate of Net Imperative (netimperative.com).
Net Imperative or netimperative - in the new media age it's impossible to be clear how any company name should be written or indeed spoken - attracted less interest than Boo because it had gobbled up only £1m of its investors' cash, a mere percentage point of the cost of Boo's brief stroll down the catwalk.
But the investors behind Net Imperative were two of the more established names in the British internet investment community, Esouk and Durlacher; so their judgement that their half-incubated infant is not worth the price of future electricity bills demands attention.
Net Imperative looked like a reasonable enough business proposition. By concentrating upon the information needs of internet business users, it avoided the obvious error of being too general, offering "need to have" not "nice to have" information, in the business-school jargon.
True, it had plenty of competitors, but its staff looked pretty well chosen and the company chairman was none other than Albert Scardino, the husband of Pearson's majoriescardino.com, and some-time frequenter of the back half of this paper.
So what went wrong? The simple answer is that the site failed to meet expectations - in terms of visitors sampling its free content (and advertisements) and numbers willing to pay £49 a year to be members of the Net Imperative club, which offers access "to a range of added-value services, such as private members' forums and closed discussion groups, browser-based e-mail, reduced cost recruitment advertising, as well as discounts and priority booking on industry events".
How to extract revenue from information consumers on the web - as opposed to grabbing up-front cash-flow from investors - remains the central business conundrum of online journalism. Every business model is being tried, from wholly encrypted subscription systems to completely free, with many hybrids such as Net Imperative in between.
At the moment, the pendulum is swinging back towards payment. The big American web launch of the month is the media site insider.com, which demands $19.95 a month from its customers. Another newcomer, the451.com, which covers technology stories, is asking £400 a year for a "seat".
This development raises some searching questions about "the needs and interests" of "users" of online news and information services. The problem, stated bluntly, is: who will pay for independent journalism? Newspapers have been kept going for a couple of centuries by a crude blend of advertising and cover price, but this model isn't working on the web.
To the extent that virtual news and information can be offered free or more cheaply because production costs are lower without dead trees, this is a cause for celebration.
But there are limits to the competitive advantages of cyber-publishing. Journalists still have to be paid - indeed, the explosion of web journalism means that they are being paid considerably more.
And whether in cyberspace or on terra firma, journalists still have to know around which set of institutional self-interests they are expected to work. A new study from the Pew Center for the Columbia Journalism Review finds that 41 per cent of journalists admitted avoiding stories or softening them "to benefit the interests of their news organisations".
That it is often harder in the hybrid world of web business models to identify this institutional self-interest doesn't mean it's not there. Some would say that the relationship between journalists and a bullying and politically partisan owner is more transparent than the "networks" of interest that form the warp and weft of the web.
This is too pessimistic, but we need to be aware that, on the internet, the structure of the commercial forces that sustain journalism is in flux, at the same time as the distinction between independently created journalism and other types of "content" is being blurred.
Just as the internet makes investors beat their brains about business models, so journalists must worry about the internet's churning effect on editorial premises and principles.
One of the merits of websites, especially American ones, is that they often include a detailed statement of editorial policy. An interesting example is that of CNET, which publishes news.com, a technology news site. Its rules on editorial staff share dealing would have helped to keep Piers Morgan out of trouble, but what's most striking about the declaration is the complexity of the potential conflicts of interest it addresses - from distribution agreements to "referral fees from merchants when we match buyers with vendors".
Perhaps with this in mind, news.com's expensive rival the451.com rails against "a world in which journalism is subverted to the imperatives of business", and brandishes the oldest slogan of them all, attributing to Lord Northcliffe the pronouncement: "News is something someone somewhere wants to suppress - all the rest is advertising."
Would it were so simple.
And Net Imperative, by the way, has found a buyer. As will the Dome. Everything has its price.
Ian Hargreaves is professor of journalism at Cardiff University
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