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Journalist’s Tradepapers or network television. Our ManagingEditor, Gene Gibbons, is a veteranwire service reporter who spentthe last 12 years as chief White Housecorrespondent for Reuters. What setsus apart from the thousands of othersites on the Web is not only our experiencein journalism but also our visionof what people are looking for on theWeb. We think it’s our ability to givereaders the tools they need to tailor theinformation we provide to meet theirdeadlines or their information needs.• Interested in education in Indiana?With two mouse clicks we’ll bringyou up to date on every significantstory on schools and educationpolicy in the Hoosier state.• Want to compare the tax burden inWisconsin to that in Maryland? Wecan do that as fast as your Pentiumchip will allow.• Want to be notified every time thereis something significant to reportabout the great social experimentwith welfare reform?We are the one stop state policyshop. You can drill deep into our informationwell or take what you want offthe surface. But all of that fast breakA later stage in designing the site. Images courtesy of stateline.orginformation rendering is, it turns out,not so easy for a computer to puttogether.Our site is not your average newspaper-on-the-Internet.That, I havelearned, is what programmers, anothername for the techies who write thecode that make computers do whatthey do, call a static site. You put it upand the computer literate come andread it. Not much interaction, no tailoringthe information to individuals’special needs. Not so different fromwhat journalists have always done. Theonly difference is that on the Web thenews doesn’t get wet on rainy days.What we designed (with the help ofthree of last year’s Nieman Fellows) is,in techno-speak, a database-driven site.Our consultant, who helped with thesite design, almost fell off his chairlaughing when I told him what I wantedto create and added, “It ought to beeasy.”Now I know why he laughed.Call it rule number one: Nothing iseasy and certainly nothing is cheapwhen it comes to the creation of onlinejournalism at this point in thedevelopment of the Web and at thislevel of complexity. Our troubles fellinto two categories. The first is attitudeand the second is software. By attitudeI mean the youthful brio that occasionallymorphs into arrogance which characterizesso much of the Internet. I’mold enough to have been around whentelevision news was new and most ofus who were attracted to it were youngand liked to try new techniques becausethey had never been tried before,or because no one knew whatviewers would watch, or because weknew we would get a rise out of ourelders just by doing it.The Web is like that. No one knowswhere it’s going, or how it will lookwhen it grows up. It’s only five yearsold. Maybe it will turn out to be justanother giant shopping mall, or maybeit will be a medium that really deservesall its hype. Maybe it truly will help toconnect people and serve democracyas well as commerce. But for now it’s agiant, sprawling, infuriatingly disorganized,untidy place where millionairesare created overnight; where consolidationis ongoing and firms are boughtand sold in a flash, and where 22 yearolds who can write code are earning$55,000 a year.You can be sure of one thing: This isnot a place where journalism and theethics that govern it find a natural home.There’s a Wild West atmosphere to allof this, and impatience with anythingthat’s not digital. Anything part of thepast is perceived as having little merit.And to the casual observer, the visualpower of various news sites can obscurethe fact that the information theyprovide can be wildly inaccurate andunscrupulously biased. It’s a world governed,if it’s governed at all, by Nike’sslogan, “Just do it.”Like the Web itself, our programmersare young and energetic. Youhave to be to write the lines of codethat make things go. But I have a mentalpicture of intense men and womenworking into the night, fueled by asteady diet of takeout pizza and DietCokes like the first programmers I evermet at M.I.T.’s Media Lab a decade ago.The difference is now they charge $125an hour.Our Web design firm disdained thekind of normal business practices mostof us learned a long time ago becausethey help lubricate the normal friction58 Nieman Reports / Fall 1999