What's next for Web news? The authors predict that newspapers (1) will adapt elements from computer networks to fit the way news is disseminated and (2) "will change to reflect the emerging moment of U.S. political and economic culture."

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Understanding Web News
The forms of the industrial newspaper emerged from the entanglement in a series of relationships. Elsewhere we discussed how the development of the newspaper in the nineteenth century resulted in the accumulation of different flows of content and audiences (see Chapter 3), so that by the end of the century the metropolitan daily had become the meeting ground for different readers with different agendas. Newspapers segmented those agendas into departments, but fixed all of the departments in the overall form. As a result, the sports fan, the entrepreneur, the shopper, the patron of the arts and the political enthusiast all came together at the site of the newspaper, which encouraged every reader in some fashion to undertake every role — to be a shopper and a voter, for instance.

The modern newspaper imposed a voice on all these streams. Elsewhere we have pointed out that the newspaper became monovocal in the modern formation. One aspect of this monovocality was a sense of identity for each specific newspaper. Readers developed a familiarity with recurring aspects of a newspaper: its editorial positions, its columnists, its ties to specific sports franchises, its promotions, even its reporters. Moreover, habitual newspaper readers could pick up a copy of an unfamiliar newspaper and figure out its character, doping out its politics, its style, its readership. This is one sense in which a newspaper creates and readers experience an environment.

The logic of corporate journalism has worked for a couple of decades to diminish a newspaper's distinctiveness. The Gannett newspapers exemplify this trend, with their cookie-cutter designs, weak local ties, bland conservative politics and overall obeisance to the demands of the chain. When strong-voiced papers like the Louisville Courier Journal and the Des Moines Register joined the other scalps on the wall of Allan Neuharth's office, it only confirmed what everyone already knew: the conditions of corporate newspapering mute a paper's voice.

The Web goes a step farther. What Gannett did by purging, the Web does by binging. The modern newspaper achieved monovocality by suppressing the multiple voices of the various streams of content it drew from. The Web ultimately disentangles those streams. Even a conservative site, such as the editorial page of The New York Times, opens itself up to the multiple voices of its sources, allowing readers to take their pick of editorial cartoonists (none of whom appears in the print edition). This potentially endless multiplication of options for the reader makes it impossible for the Web newspaper to impose a voice on its matter.

In the same way, the Web also disperses a newspaper's readers. The modern newspaper brought all readers together in the same common space, but a Web edition directs them all to discrete rooms. A reader with an interest in sports need never glance at a public affairs story along the way. In fact, such a reader need no longer rely on the daily newspaper at all as a source of news. A sports fan may go directly to the ESPN site — still at this writing the most frequently visited content provider — and from there directly to a team site. For that reason, despite the fact that many newspapers, especially The New York Times, load up their sites with more matter than they make available in print, the readers of these sites are likely to read less of it than they would in print and are also less likely to remember what they read. These are empirical questions that require further investigation, but the form of online news points to a greater volatility or mobility in reading. If the metropolitan daily encouraged a common space of general knowledge, then the Web encourages narrower spaces of specialized knowledge. Anyone interested in the politics of Togo, a tiny nation and home to Africa's longest ruling dictator, can browse widely (and automatically) through the Web to cull news stories from many sources. Thus, general readers can imitate reading practices formerly reserved for scholars and other specialists.

Popularizing specialist knowledge has democratic potential, of course. Web design by its nature weakens the editor's mediation of news flow. Instead of relying on the editor of the Enquirer sports page, a Cincinnati Reds fan may go directly to some of the sources that the newspaper used that day — the Associated Press wire or the Reds front office. The fans can be their own editors. In fact, all sorts of people can build their own news media this way, taking a little from a wide range of sites.

Although they may feel like free agents in an anarchic landscape, readers are simultaneously targets for increasingly well-aimed advertising messages and marketing campaigns, the end result of which strengthens the economic position of the most successful of the new media, the ones that can claim the most hits. Those sites overwhelmingly are the Web versions of old media, print and broadcast alike. The independent reader, with apparently increasing freedom, also becomes an increasingly precise market segment. The trend did not originate with the Web. Newspapers experimented for years with ways to "narrowcast" their products, and most major newspapers produce zoned editions, targeted to particular locales. Much of the motivation grew out of advertising. Newspapers that can identify and deliver well-chosen market segments can expect geometric increases in advertising revenue. The same holds for magazines, although on a national rather than a local level (Abrahamson, 1996), as well as for other commercial media (Turow, 1997).

The Web nevertheless allows a new level of disarticulation, and the ultimate driving factor remains promotional, as we have already stated. The New York Times, for instance, began to request demographic information from subscribers early on and employs technology that allows advertisers to target particular readers. At the same time, Amazon, the largest advertiser on the Web, is willing to maintain links to Times book reviews and kick back a fee to the Times when a reader jumps from the Times Book Review section to Amazon and orders a book. The line between the medium and the advertiser has blurred radically, in both agenda and style.

But dire predictions of newsprint's demise add little to an understanding of the process of change. In its actual functioning, the World Wide Web intersects with print journalism in much the same way as the advertising industry complements the newspaper industry. On-line news does not compete directly with printed newspapers as newspapers once competed with radio or movies with television.

Digital Transformation
The printed press can and probably will continue to coexist with online news sites, whence newspapers can expect a continual flow of innovation. We can offer two observations on the likely course of change. First, newspapers will adapt elements from computer networks to fit news culture, just as press photography, as it grew out from the tradition of engraving, increasingly took on the values of journalism. Photojournalism emerged from the dialectic of new form (photographs) and existing content (journalism), as all invaders have done. The outcome resulted from melding and compromise, not utter rout or defeat for print, as some journalists predicted at the time. The same will hold for digital news, especially as it generates revenue. Mainstream dailies at first embraced the Web as a defensive move. Newspapers rushed into cyberspace to stake claims to their traditional monopolies — classified advertising, financial information and sports information, especially — before upstarts like the Microsoft Street pages preempted them. Newspapers at first did not anticipate profits from their Internet sites. It came as something of a surprise when, in 1998, a majority began to break even or make money, but even then the profitability depended on the free content available from the print edition. At century's end, it is still very doubtful that The New York Times could survive separately as a Web edition, and in fact every profitable Web news site of any significance depends on a non-Web news organization, drawing on, but not paying for, its news-gathering resources.

U.S. Political And Economic Culture
Our second observation on the process of encountering the online world is that newspapers will change to reflect the emerging moment of U.S. political and economic culture. As modernism arrived in the United States, the mode of pictorial narrative changed. Newspapers accomplished the change first by using collage and then by filling entire picture pages, shifting pictorial representations from static iconism (stock campaign engravings) in the nineteenth century republican ideal to picture-as-content (journalist-produced candid shots) in the twentieth-century professional ideal. Clearly, computer networks have already had a parallel influence. Content from online sources has achieved greater status in the hierarchy of news. Newspapers began to advertise their electronic scoops in much the same way they had plugged photojournalism — the last picture, the latest picture — early on. The earlier change accompanied the loss of image-as-handicraft. Not only did engraving and sketch art end, replaced by the supposedly mechanical photograph, but also the change led to the disappearance of artists' signatures, which at first had appeared within press photography as autographs. Artists, like authors, were eventually swallowed up in technical expertise. A computer-based parallel could result in a loss to the handicraft of reporting, continuing the pattern set as telephones placed mediation between journalists and sources. Another result, the growth of homemade news in the utopian vision of the Internet, seems less likely. The first few years of the World Wide Web pointed not to homemade but to corporate news, with institutional arbiters claiming to manufacture the facts and filter out the gossip (the realm of e-mail and perhaps chat rooms).

Eventually Web news will absorb many functions of print, just as illustrations eventually took over much of the visual work previously done by verbal reports. Twentieth-century journalists, leaving description to the camera, turned especially to prediction. The future tense, although not absent in early reportage, had usually conveyed details ("the color guard of the 82nd infantry will follow the casket"). As photographs took over the details, reporters began to speak confidently of a wider future. Online archives can supplant the background summaries central to explanatory news stories, as well as the repetition of pictures that have formed collective identity in the modern memory. The form of the Web moves news even further from event-centered reporting and toward analysis, interpretation and prediction (Barnhurst & Mutz, 1997).

The changes would leave the journalist as expert, but also would suggest a return to the journalist as advocate. The disappearance of partisan journalism was surprisingly recent, accomplished more by the professional newspaper than by the industrial newspaper. The industrial newspaper produced economies of scale that led to conditions of local monopoly for newspapers; cultural factors then encouraged building a sense of professionalism on that foundation. Web newspapers, although somewhat monopolistic, also break down the barriers necessary to sustain monopoly. The local market we examined in western Massachusetts had gained a wider reach and had also lost its insularity in the electronic frontier. The spatial and economic geography of North America, which retarded the appearance of national newspapers in the United States, becomes attenuated on the Web. In an electronic marketplace, we can imagine a series of truly national newspapers competing. Why shouldn't these come to occupy partisan positions (of the European sort)? Even without the advent of partisan national media online, journalists might become partisan on their own. The availability of a largely free and linkable universe of information can allow a journalist the kind of autonomy that previously required entrepreneurial genius (of someone like I. F. Stone) or immense prominence (of someone like Seymour Hersh).

Most discussions of computer-based news tend to hyperbole and oversimplification. It is as if the visual landscape had changed abruptly, with the appearance of effects such as the link and the moving image within news text. Our examination of picture regimes showed that it is too simple to assert such sudden transformations. The visual was not simply missing before the rise of news photography in the twentieth century. In the same vein, motion in newspapers was not absent before the rise of the World Wide Web. Not only did all sorts of visual ways exist to represent the news, but also newspapers had textual ways of presenting an active vision of events. Even in the nineteenth century, newspapers could use techniques such as walking description to incorporate imagery, as well as motion, into text well before either cameras or computers entered newsrooms.

The role of online news in [the] 2000s is ambiguous, but no more so than the role of photojournalism in the 1930s, the full adoption of which was more equivocal than is often acknowledged. Photojournalism, like the Web, resulted from technological advance, of course, and also from artistic innovation. The shift came about when newsworkers learned how to make photographs as lucid as engravings, a step that required not only advances in the speed and handling of cameras but also in the visual conception of newspaper pages. Instead of containing a narrative within a single engraving from sketches, photography required integrating pictures into news, coopting many tasks of text, and publishing multiple images to tell a story. It is not surprising that editors resisted at first, just as many of them now look askance at the online environment. Web designs, like picture pages, move news even further from contained, linear narrative. Newsworkers are now re-conceptualizing journalism as they learn to make electronic pages do the work of news, a step fostered by advances in technology but also by the larger visual environment.

— Kevin G. Barnhurst, associate professor of communication at the University of Illinois at Chicago, is the author of "Seeing the Newspaper" (Bedford/St. Martins Press). He has been a visiting scholar in the School of the Arts at Columbia University and has lectured widely on graphic design. John Nerone is a professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. A leading historian of communication, he is the author of several previous books, including "Violence Against the Press: Policing the Public Sphere in U.S. History" (Oxford Univ. Press).

This essay was excerpted from the book "The Form of News: A History," by Kevin G. Barnhurst and John Nerone (The Guilford Press). Copyright © 2001. Reprinted with permission of The Guilford Press.

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