ALL THE YOUNG NEWS
The Webby Awards' balancing act between Establishment and Anarchy is written all over the nominations to the News and Print & Zines categories

by Matt Welch
05.05.00

Four years on, the Webby Awards have become a lot like the Web sites they honor--flush with sudden success, self-conscious about staying true to their wild roots, and a bit frazzled from trying to keep up with the pace of change in Internet-land.

Only in a town as bizarre as modern-day San Francisco could a serious awards show employ judges such as "Sixth Sense" boy actor Haley Joel Osment and Ben & Jerry's co-founder Jerry Greenfield, and yet be snooty enough to limit attendance to the most hotly contested invite-only list around. "If you'd like to get involved," organizers advise the rest of us, you can always "volunteer to join the crew."

The Webbys' balancing act between Establishment and Anarchy is written all over the nominations to the News and Print & Zines categories. Once-revolutionary sites such as Salon, Feed, Nerve and News.com are now as entrenched as Meryl Streep, and have been joined by such decidedly un-hip fogies as ABC News and the Wall Street Journal.

"It's pretty funny," says Salon Managing Editor Scott Rosenberg. "We're kind of waking up to the fact that we are, I wouldn't say 'establishment' but certainly say 'established,' in a way that wouldn't be conceivable four years ago. I think the challenge for us... is to keep our liveliness and edge and willingness to publish unconventional stuff even as we recognize the need to prosper."

But chaos still has a seat or two at the banquet table. Jim Romenesko's one-man weblog Medianews is nominated for both categories, while some twentysomething Linux freaks from Holland, Michigan, who can't spell so good have burst onto the scene with the wonderfully confounding Slashdot. Weirdest of all may be Mediaattack.com, a site that debuted just two months ago, featuring documentary footage of a notorious media prankster infiltrating talk shows and news programs. It's nominated for best news site.

Here are the nominees for best News, and Print & Zine sites. They are presented in reverse order of how I would vote for them, if I was as qualified to judge as, say, Aimee Mann.

NEWS


Mediaattack.com

For more than 10 years, the mysterious "Media Attacker" has been calling up hundreds of TV talk shows, using fake voices and Situationist-style absurdity to befuddle celebrity guests and hosts as part of a campaign to encourage higher-quality media. Earlier this year, an interactive entertainment firm called Oddcast began broadcasting his left-bent stunts in such slow-to-load installments such as "Jesse Helms" and "Leslie Stahl."

"The Media Attacker is a college friend of my brother-in-law," explains 30-year-old Oddcast CEO Adi Sideman. "I'm a documentary filmmaker in my previous life, and I thought it was a fascinating thing that he was doing... with a very interesting agenda."

Sideman, an Israel native who directed the controversial men-who-love-boys documentary "Chicken Hawk" in 1994, says he'll continue posting one new episode per week; there are currently 12.

"I'd never heard about the Webby Awards until we were nominated, and I certainly didn't expect to be nominated," he says. "I'm thrilled that it's being acknowledged as newsworthy."

Jim Romenesko's MediaNews

It has been quite a year for Jim Romenesko. Twelve months ago, he was a full-time technology reporter for the St. Paul Pioneer Press who woke up ridiculously early each morning to post links and snappy one-paragraph summaries of odd articles he encountered during his voracious reading of regional newspapers, alternative weeklies and obscure zines. Then in May last year he decided to hive off the considerable amount of media-related stuff from The Obscure Store and Reading Room, and post them on a new site called MediaGossip.

The elegantly simple site, including scores of links to columnists and publications, became the first stop for vain and lazy media reporters (myself included) looking for story ideas and praying their stories would be linked. Then in August, the New York Times featured Romenesko prominently in an article about weblogs, and two days later the Poynter Institute school of journalism offered to pay him full-time to turn MediaGossip into MediaNews. Now the 46-year-old has become a news-industry icon, updating the site throughout the day, conducting more and more original interviews, and now being nominated for two Webbys.

"I'm flattered. It's kind of out of the blue," Romenesko says. "I'm just thrilled that I'm on those lists."

MediaNews' double nomination illustrates the difficulties of choosing Webby categories--there is no "weblog" division (which it would likely win), and exactly what does "Print & Zines" mean anyway? "When I first started," Romenesko says, "I'd never even heard the term 'weblog.'"

The new success has allowed him to "move down to Chicago, where I've always wanted to be... and to be able to work out of my apartment, and not have to pay daily parking fees and drink bad coffee."

Typically, Romenesko will be home during the Webbys. "I'll be watching the webcast," he explains. "Someone's got to mind the store."

News.com

San Francisco-based CNET is a granddaddy of sorts in the extremely crowded tech/biz field. Since its 1995 launch, CNET's News.com has stood out not only for its clear and sophisticated coverage, but also for its exhaustive ethics, disclosure and corrections policies. It refuses, for example, to take a percentage of sales from products it reviews--a policy stricter than that of the New York Times.

CNET's other properties include several product-related sites, a half-dozen television programs and, along with partner NBC, the search engine Snap.com. News.com is a familiar-looking blend of headlines, stock tickers, links to outside coverage and original coverage subdivided into Communications, Enterprise Computing, Entertainment & Media, E-Business, and Personal Technology.

And though CNET's stock has taken a tumble along with the rest of NASDAQ--as of May 2 it was down 32 percent on the year--the company has avoided the free-falls that have plagued content companies such as TheStreet.com and Salon.

Wall Street Journal Interactive

Publishing the Web's only truly successful paid-subscription news site has its plusses and minuses, says WSJ.com Managing Editor Rich Jaroslovsky.

"On the one hand I always feel really gratified [for WSJ.com's 430,000 subscribers]... but on the other hand it also raises the stakes continuously for us, because the entire rest of the Web are our competition," Jaroslovsky says. "We've got to be better than everything people can get for free."

Besides showcasing the global editions of the Wall Street Journal (you can set your preferences for the U.S., Europe or Asia), WSJ.com offers excellent online-only coverage of the New Economy, a battery of personalization features, and access to the Dow Jones Publications Library, which is sort of a poor man's Lexis-Nexis.

Jaroslovsky has become a respected leader in the Internet news field, heading up the new Online News Association, which he says may be announcing a new awards ceremony of its own before the May 11 Webbys. "I think we're all still working out how you recognize excellence in this new medium," he says. "Certainly [the Webbys] have established themselves as an important barometer of recognition."

ABCNews.com

It is usually hard to distinguish between the main news sites of the largest media conglomerates--a bunch of wire-service headlines, coverage broken down into the usual categories, search and personalization features, video reports, maybe some live chats with anchors or star columnists. But there is an elusive something that makes ABCNews.com worth reading in a way that even CNN.com is not.

"I think it's a combination of things," says Vice President/General Manager Bernard Gershon. "It's the excellent journalists who work here throughout ABC News... it's the way we integrate our online programming with what is on the air... it's the audio and video assets, which I think are far superior to everybody else's."

Somehow, this division of Disney has managed to cop the feel of a spirited, even independent Internet company. The travel section, for example, is one of the best on the Internet, managing to be both provocative and terribly useful, even if the bulk of its content is culled from wire sources.

The site's original content is good enough to have won overseas reporting awards for its Kosovo coverage, and for those who care about such things there are daily emails from Peter Jennings and the like.

"We're not just looking for people to repurpose TV news," Gershon says.

PRINT & ZINES


Jim Romenesko's MediaNews

See commentary above.

Feed

Feed is one of those New Media upstarts that has quite suddenly become a member of the Online Establishment. This is the third Webby nomination for the Manhattan-based daily magazine, which has been tickling eyeballs with smart cultural essays and debate since 1995.

"It's strange. I suppose we are the old guard, but we're still so new, we're still young, and we're still drawing people away from print," says Culture Editor Alex Abramovich.

But, unlike before, they can actually pay ("quite competitively," Abramovich reports) for the 90 percent or so freelanced opinion and reportage that powers the site. Popular features include the Feed Daily essay and the smart reader reaction to it, Editor-in-Chief Steve Johnson's "Interface" columns about web design, plus a series of bimonthly special issues on topics such as DNA and documentary filmmaking.

Abramovich, who considers his competition to be print publications such as the New Republic and New York Review of Books rather than Salon or Slate, says there is some truth to the widespread rumors that Feed is trying to form a network of sorts with like-minded smart-set websites. "There's probably going to be an announcement in the next few months," he says.

Nerve

In three short years Nerve, the self-described champion of "literary smut," has shattered conventional wisdom two times; now it's going in for thirds. First went the notion that sex was a segregated subject, to be read about and viewed in militantly separate rooms for each gender and preference. Second went the idea that the Internet was inhospitable to high-quality writing and artistic photography.

Now, after winning a loyal following of more than a half-million readers, Nerve is reversing the traditional publishing trajectory by branching out from New Media to the Old, with a bimonthly magazine, a CD of spoken-word performance, an Internet radio station and several books, the first of which is in its fifth printing.

Genevieve Field, 30, who co-founded Nerve with partner Rufus Griscom, says that publishing on the Internet "started out as a necessity."

"We had $130,000 to start with, and you can't really launch a magazine with that," she says. "And from the very beginning our philosophy has been that our content has to hold up in any medium... We wanted to pay really great writers and photographers rather than spend all our money on marketing and advertising."

Nerve's core site includes an alluring Photo of the Day, several weekly columns--such as "Jack's Naughty Bits: A Weekly Romp Through the History of Literature" by Jack Murnighan --a cartoon "Position of the Day," plus several new pieces of fiction, poetry and photography every week. There's an extensive community section--the personal ads are a must--and the site is also published in French, German and Spanish.

"We're the brand to be associated with the sexual ideology of the times," Field says. "It's a much more progressive and pan-sexual and gay-friendly take on sex than Playboy."

Disclosure: Field and I worked at the same college newspaper.

Salon

By now, most Americans with a modem have probably heard about Salon. The dean of San Francisco Web magazines seems to make national headlines about once every two months, whether it be for muckraking (such as Dan Forbes' recent revelations about White House anti-drug propaganda), partisan-flavored tomfoolery (Dan Savage's piece about licking doorknobs on the Gary Bauer campaign trail, Editor David Talbot's polemic defending Salon's outing of Henry Hyde's 30-year-old extramarital affair), or even finance (Salon was one of the first companies to go public in an "open IPO").

But regular readers are just as likely to come back for features like Garrison Keillor's love advice, Camille Paglia's rambling invectives, or Jake Tapper's smart campaign reporting. The site continues to have the look and feel of what can happen if the brightest journalists at a newsroom--in this case, the early nineties San Francisco Examiner--are given the freedom to publish whatever the hell they want.

After three straight Webby victories and oodles of both praise and scorn, Salon's staff has swelled from 50 to around 140, and the pressure is on to start making this experiment pay off, Managing Editor Scott Rosenberg says.

"We've got the size of company now where we can produce a ton of daily content that we're proud of, and we're just sort of pushing forward as well as we can toward that magical profitability level," he says. "Our plan wasn't built around the infinite supply of money."

Disclosure: I wrote an article for Salon in 1998.

Slashdot

If anarchy, energy and genre-bending are to be rewarded at this year's Webby's then Slashdot will be the winner of Print & Zines hands-down. It is certainly one of the more difficult sites to describe.

"We're a lot of things: Journalism, Community, Weblog, Party, Panel," co-founder Rob "CmdrTaco" Malda tried to explain, via email. "But we're not any of these things."

What they are is a well-designed, aggressively interactive free-for-all moderated by a dozen or so early twenties self-described "Nerds," working from their corporate condo in Holland, Michigan. A typical day goes something like this: Readers send in around 500 submissions, usually amounting to a single heavily linked paragraph or two describing some new article or nugget of info plucked from the Internet. Of these, around 15 or so get posted (basically, whoever's first on a topic deemed interesting), and then the real fun begins, as readers send in approximately 3,000 reactions, arguments and counterpunches, ranging from geeky bull sessions about music, to hyper-sophisticated technical discussions about things most people couldn't possibly understand.

Technology reporters have learned to lurk in the corridors, sniffing for technical and societal topics that otherwise bubble up to the surface months later, or just hyping their own work. One of the earliest enthusiasts of the Slashdot culture and site was longtime New Media guy Jon Katz, who writes frequent columns, and is routinely savaged by Slashdot's highly skeptical readership.

Submissions are screened, scored and unpaid; meanwhile Slashdot's owners sold their company to Linux megasite Andover.net last year for $1.5 million in cash and $7 million in Andover stock at the IPO price.

"There is a group of people who think I'm hypocritical for being successful and running something perceived as 'alternative,' but the reality was that because of the scale of Slashdot, it either had to make some money, or else it would have died," said Malda, who turns 24 May 10. "You can't serve a million pages a day off Geocities, ya know? We all work long days making sure Slashdot happens each and every day. If we had to have day jobs, they wouldn't have Slashdot."

Correction: When this story was posted, Feed Culture Editor Alex Abramovich's name was misspelled. Newcity.com regrets the error.

Matt Welch is a staff writer and columnist for Online Journalism Review

Editor's note: Newcity.com is a sponsor of the 2000 Webby Awards, but its coverage of the event remains independent of that agreement.