Matt Drudge (Photo courtesy of Matt Drudge Information Center) Online Journalism: Megaphone For The Masses Or Moral Sinkhole? Media coverage of the Internet is equal parts cyberhype and calamity-howling—"It's A Small World"-visions of an electronically interconnected global village on one hand, and on the other, nightmares about the Net as a hunting ground for con artists and pedophiles, an incubator of hysterias and hoaxes. Unsurprisingly, coverage of online media is no less polarized, hailing the Net as a leveler of the journalistic playing field and damning it as a launching pad for rumormongers who play reporters on TV. Matt Drudge is the best-known brand in the online retailing of hearsay and juicy half-truth. A would-be Walter Winchell with a modem who publishes his "Drudge Report" from what he calls "a moldy apartment just off Hollywood Boulevard," Drudge attained overnight notoriety in 1998 when he leaked news of a Newsweek magazine investigation into allegations that President Clinton had had an affair with a White House intern. For many in the mainstream press, Drudge is the poster boy for all that's wrong with Net journalism. He plays fast and loose with the facts, eschews old-school distinctions between hard news and entertainment, makes no apologies for his neo-conservative bias and appropriates other reporters' stories. To the journalistic establishment, he and the online disinfotainment he represents are a grim premonition of the death of journalism in the age of instant news, when there's no time to source and ethics are roadkill on the road to the scoop. To those who extol the Net as a utopian remedy to the fact that freedom of the press, as A.J. Liebling noted, "belongs solely to those that own the printing press," Drudge is the Tom Paine of cyberspace. Does online journalism hold forth the promise of a more democratic media? Or is it just a bullhorn for the booboisie and the beginning of the end of journalism as we know it? MediaChannel affiliates and other informed sources weigh in. - Mark Dery, "Online Journalism" editor

WAR OF THE WORLDS: OLD MEDIA VS. NEW MEDIA Wiring Of The Fourth Estate In "Changing Journalism: The Influence of the Internet," UNESCO contributor Erin Phelan wonders whether Net journalism will democratize the media or usher us into a wired world where "sound bytes and headlines stream across the computer screen, focused on immediacy rather than accuracy or content." From UNESCO - Communication, Information and Informatics Sector, December 30 1999.  Things To Come Writing for the Freedom Forum Online's Media Studies Journal, Elizabeth Weise conjures up the brave new world of journalism in the year 2025, when the public has been atomized into a nation of microniches encouraged by the media "to pay attention only to their narrow interests, presented as entertainment." From Freedom Forum, July 16 1999.  Revenge Of The Nerds The geek will inherit the earth. In fact, he already has, argue Columbia Journalism Review contributors Joel Simon and Carol Napolitano in "We're All Nerds Now." The warp-speed evolution of networked computing and the instant access to information it brings is transforming journalism. From Columbia Journalism Review, April 1 1999.  TRIUMPH OF THE SWILL: THE INTERNET AND THE END OF JOURNALISM Happy Bedfellows: Drudge And Flynt "Matt Drudge and Larry Flynt: Two of a Kind?" asks Online Journalism Review columnist J.D. Lasica. Are the Cheng and Eng of on- and offline journalism just bottom-feeders wrapping themselves in the First Amendment or a legitimate challenge to the status quo of establishment journalism, she wonders. Either way, concludes Lasica, "Journalists have to ask ourselves: Are we ever going to get out of writing about sex lives if we don't draw the line somewhere?" From Online Journalism Review, January 11 1999.  Guardians Of The Status Quo According to Online Journalism Review writer Matt Welch, the old guard has a vested interest in bashing Internet journalism. "The tension between those who once 'controlled' publishing and the new generation of modem pamphleteers frequently escalates into what sounds like a pitched battle between the 'elitists' and the 'populists,'" he argues, in "Why Does Old Media Trash the New?" From Online Journalism Review, June 24 1998.  Vulgarians At The Gates Is the moral rot of online reporting eating away at the credibility of mainstream journalism? Geoffrey Cowan, publisher of the Online Journalism Review and dean of the Annenberg School for Communication, is afraid that the distinction between papers of record and fishwrap is disappearing. "Day after day, stories have appeared in the mainstream press, reported as fact, and then [been] retracted as inaccurate," he writes, in "Has Online Reporting Tainted Journalism?" From Online Journalism Review, May 18 1998.  The Drudge Factor "The Drudge factor — that is, the extreme disintermediation of our information environment — means that responsibility for determining truth rests as much with those who consume information as with those who produce it," writes Internet policy analyst and media commentator Andrew L. Shapiro. In "The Drudge Factor," a chapter excerpted from his book "The Control Revolution: How The Internet is Putting Individuals in Charge and Changing the World We Know," Shapiro argues that what Drudge calls "citizen journalism" is undermining our faith in reporters as truth-tellers even as it's putting the masses back in the mass media. NET GAIN: ONLINE REPORTING—OUR LAST, BEST HOPE Open-Source Journalism "Open-source journalism" is the practice of making news stories available to knowledgeable online communities for their collective scrutiny and corrections before publication. Advocates herald it as "the new journalism, perfecting all that is wrong with traditional journalism," according to Jin Moon of the Freedom Forum's Media Studies Center. From Freedom Forum, October 14 1999.  Revolt Of The Masses Shovelers of sleaze like Matt Drudge are hardly exemplars of journalism, concedes Lawrence K. Grossman, a former President of NBC news and PBS. Even so, The New York Times's use of cyber-correspondents in Serbia as an alternative news source and Amazon.com's willingness to feature reviews by ordinary readers opens the door to a more egalitarian journalism. From Columbia Journalism Review, August 1 1999.  Not Exactly The End Of The World James Fallows thinks "the developments ushered in by Internet news have been, on balance, positive. Real journalism is being practiced there." Online magazines such as Salon and Slate embrace the standards of traditional journalism, he argues. To Fallows, hard-news Net sites, such as MSNBC's, offer more substantive coverage than TV news. From The American Prospect, November 23 1999.  Liebling's Revenge From the online community's zero-tolerance response to Time magazine's notorious — and notoriously flawed — cover story on cyberporn to the e-mail bombardment routinely received by media critics like Jon Katz, who compares the experience to "being tied to the back of a car and dragged through the street," media consumers are using the Net to challenge Big Media's cultural authority, says new-media critic Andrew L. Shapiro. As well, they're creating their own grassroots media, using digital technologies such as the World Wide Web to challenge mainstream media's exclusive right to determine what news is "fit to print." MENDING THE NET: IMPROVING ONLINE JOURNALISM New Mindset, New Skill Set According to attendees of NetMedia 99, a conference held in London last year, journalists who want to excel as online reporters need to cultivate "a new mindset and specialized skills." From cyber-times.org, August 9 1999.  Operating Code Online journalism badly needs job standards, argues Jeffrey A. Perlman, an electronic editor for The Los Angeles Times. According to Perlman, classified ads for online reporters often stress a knowledge of QuarkXPress over expertise or experience as a journalist. Lack of common standards is fostering "confusion and some subtle tensions" within the new-media news industry, he contends. From Online Journalism Review, February 18 1999.  Career Opportunities Online journalism offers lean, mean young reporters an opportunity to stake their claims in the wide-open territory of new media, writes Steve Outing of the Cyber-times in "Why online journalism is a great career choice." He asserts, "The rules haven't been written yet." Moreover, "there aren't as many barriers to quick advancement in new media as there are in old media." From cyber-times.org, April 21 1999.    What's Your View? Speak Out in the MediaChannel Forum. AS THE MEDIA WATCH THE WORLD, WE WATCH THE MEDIA.