This session discussed in more specific terms some of the problems and pitfalls of this new industry including business pressures and the breakdown of the wall between advertising and editorial content.

Lewis Perdue, President of IdeaWorx and Founder of SmartWired Inc., a Web and print information company, argued that on the Internet, there are more opportunities to be dishonest and confuse advertising with content. Therefore, it's crucial at this early stage of development to create credibility or the Internet will be seen as just another infomercial:

"I think there is an opportunity for integrity that new media can bring to the information and in a sense avoid some of the mistakes of old media.

Old media is expensive. It's very expensive, and a lot of the expensive nature of old media means that you have to make a lot of money and you have to have a lot of advertisers, and integrity tends to get lost in the numbers at some point. So one of my calls to arms for new media is for integrity to become something that the individuals involve with this, because the beauty of new media is that an individual can be the medium.

"... There are really three levels of ... new media prostitution. The grossest street walker level of media prostitution are the sites out there that are completely paid and they don't let their advertisers know it. There was one called Culinary.net, and it's a very nicely designed site. It's got [eye candy], it's got depth of content, and it's got no integrity at all ... They don't tell you that the whole thing is one giant ad. The tobacco companies tend to do this.

"This happens frequently in wine sites. A couple of the publications I used to own are in the wine business, so I know that... There's one called DrinkWine.com ... You go into this and it just says it's created for individuals 24 years of age to provide the best winery information, blah, blah, blah, and then they've got this list of wineries, every single one of them paid to be there. No disclosure. Once again, you need to tell people.

"This happens all the time. Most of the time you go in the Web and you find a directory, it's just for the people who paid to be there. You go to NapaValley.com, ... and you get a list of featured wineries. There's your other tipoff, if it says it's a featured anything, it has paid to be there.

"Unfortunately, the specifics could go on and on and on. The Web has the danger of becoming one giant guppy rinker infomercial. I think the call for integrity right now is something that can either produce a movement of users on-line toward quality, or burn everybody out and have the Web dismissed and everything on-line dismissed as just another infomercial.

... These are old medium issues recast in a medium that gives us more opportunities to be dishonest. In print you can't sell a link from a word. In print you can't sell a key word that pops up on your page to put your advertisers up front. It's easier to hide the paid content on a Web site than it is in television or in print.

... There's nothing wrong with advertising. There's nothing wrong with any of the sort of things that serve the system that we have in supporting content, but the disclosure is there. If you have a banner, you have a graphic, you have something on the page that's a paid ad, you should say sponsored by, brought to you by, paid by, paid advertisement. Be right up front, because consumers of information are more savvy today than they've ever been before. Once you pull the wool over their eyes, they're going to be twice as angry next time...

"We were debating over lunch whether or not CNET's code of ethics should be available on-line to all users. I come down on yes, I think it should be, and I think that yes, every site should have a code of ethics that they adhere to and put it up there to say we adhere to this code of ethics, and here, take a look at it. We won't do this, we won't do that, we will do this. .. I think the only way for the Web to become self-policing is for the site owners, the site editors, the site publishers to create the expectation among users that the site is put together in an ethical way."

Phil Lemmons, editorial Director of PC World, drafted the American Society of Magazine Editor's (ASME) Guidelines for New Media. He explained some of the specific guidelines established by ASME, and, like Lewis Perdue, he sees one of the most important guidelines as that which helps editors in this new medium maintain a distinction between content and advertising:

"The ASME Guidelines were intended to be the equivalent of some guidelines that exist for print magazines. It's just that the arrival of new media, of the on-line medium, was used as an opportunity to try and blow away some old standards. There are marketing executives who say that the distinction between advertising and editorial is going to disappear, it's outlived its usefulness. And when you say but readers or viewers are entitled to know whether they're looking at independent content or at something that was paid for and under the control of an advertiser, they say oh, that's linear thinking.

"It's interesting, deceptive advertising is actually illegal in the United States under the ... Federal Trade Commission Act... I may not get the legal terms correct, but they've held that there can be deception that's substantial... like saying this stuff will cure cancer when it won't in an ad... There can also be deception by form. That's when something that is not independent and it's really trying to push a product or a service or a company, masquerades as something else, and that's infomercials, it's unlabeled special advertising sections in magazines, and it's also some Web sites that are like the ones Lewis referred to.

"ASME, the American Society of Magazine Editors, started having to deal with these issues because magazines started putting up a lot of Web sites and the editors assigned to those sites were being asked to do things or told to do things that they hadn't ever been asked to do or told to do before...

"...The kinds of issues that had come up that led to the issuance of the guidelines were the sale of links and editorial content. What if someone on the advertising sales force in an article in a computer publication or a computer publication site sells a link to Compaq? What if Compaq paid to have a link to Compaq in the article? What if Compaq wasn't even in the article to start with? Essentially, you've sold editorial coverage. In print you don't do that if you're at all reputable. That sort of thing, and I'm not saying that I know of examples specific to the field of computers, but that sort of thing was happening, and that's the sort of thing that people were appealing to ASME to do something about.

"So one of the provisions of this says that links are under the sole control of the editors and they can't be sold. No publication may sell outright or make a condition of any advertising sale, a link from its editorial content to any other site.

"Another thing says the site has to say whose it is very prominently when you get to it, because you can have big deceptions starting up front if the site doesn't clearly identify itself.

"... And there was a lot of debate about how to deal with the issue, that on all on-line pages there will be a clear distinction made between editorial and advertising content. Great freedom was left as to how to make that distinction, whether it's through words, design, placement, or any other effective method. The reason it was left so general is that this on-line media are new. There aren't contentions yet. And it wasn't clear to those of us working on the guidelines that we could prescribe the correct solution to this problem forever. But the general test is whether at a glance people can tell what's advertising and what's editorial. You pass the test if people can tell at a glance. If they have to work at it then the distinction isn't clear.

"The phenomenon of the special advertising sections, and these are things that are written to order for advertisers. They look like editorial content. In print, the ASME guidelines say those have to be in a different font and a different design from the magazine. At the top of every page they have to have the word "advertisement" and that word has to be in type that is at least as large as the book face, the main text face used in the magazine.

"On-line things were appearing that were in fact paid content and they weren't labeled in any way. It's so easy to go from something that's independent editorial by a link into something that's not. The deception's really somewhat simpler than just flipping through a magazine.

"Another big issue, and one that I didn't [think ]these guidelines resolved quite satisfactorily, is that publications shouldn't display their logos adjacent to or near the logo of another company. The exception these guidelines make, it says basically it's okay for what's called custom publishing. Custom publishing is when a publishing company creates a publication for an advertiser..."

Web consultant Steven Chin explained firsthand how the pressure to make every piece of content profitable and appealing to advertisers has increased immensely with the Web and can ruin what was meant to be a journalistic endeavor.

"I get to present the cautionary tale of creating a company where you actually do have an independent editorial channel and a retail channel on the Web.

"The notion to create [a commercially driven Asian-American Web site] in the spring of '95... It overcame a lot of the traditional geographic and regional barriers of doing a print publication or even video or audio programming, and there were a lot of Asians on computers...

"On the content side, I felt I had a strong network of some of the top Asian-American writers and thinkers who could really drive the engine for discussions around what it meant to be Asian in America in the '90s, on all fronts -- racial, political, economic, sexual. I was also busily aggregating a lot of the news weeklies that were being published in different states, and I had about 30 of those publications ready to deliver content... Most importantly, I wanted to create a space in a home in cyberspace for Asian-Americans...

"... It really wasn't until I actually took the idea to AOL Greenhouse and worked with them for about six months on programming that things started to click.... I ended up with a management team that consisted of... McKinsey consultants and Harvard Business School grads, and they were working either in software, marketing, or in database startups. It seemed like a nice combination where we had... the network in the Valley to bring in the newest technology that was being developed. So we ended up not taking the AOL money and we just went with money that was brought in through my management team.

"I guess that's where things started to get rough because I was the only editorial person among all the investors and among all the management team. The notion of building a content site to them was intriguing, but it wasn't the end-all, which it was more for me, creating a journalistic site. They were interested in bringing people through the content but driving them into a retail channel that we were developing. We devoted a lot of energy to building out a store which carries about a thousand products now, and also working through channels in Asia to actually bring in products directly from Asia, and work on cutting out the middle man which the Internet seems so perfect at doing.

"So we started, I guess as management consultants tend to do, wanting to grid and graph everything, and the first place they turned was to the editorial process. So some of the questions that arose very early on were rating productivity. Beyond just making deadlines. Return on investment per story. What kind of stories were we going to do? Should the decision to write a story be based on how long it takes to create, design, and code?

"Then we started struggling over the value of editorial contribution to the company versus the value of marketing or ad sales. Basically finding myself in the position of how much equity stake do the editorial people get versus these other teams, and they seem to be getting completely shafted.

"So very quickly, we kind of bounced on all these obstacles of conflict. We had a marketing consulting arm where we would agree to help market people on the web, test market products, which meant developing infomercials. So there was a struggle over how to basically create distinction between the real editorial product. We went through basically developing a code of ethics, but on a case by case basis, through visual language. How do we advertise products in the store on the pages on which we were actually creating content? And partnerships--Things like deals with book companies, how would this affect the tone of the article as they're reviewed? Knowing that if we printed a negative story, it could result in little or no sales, and that was a waste of resources.

"We were in a startup mode. We were selling basically a content retail model to investors with the intent on IPO'ing in a few years. So like all startups in that framework, your goal is to hit your milestones in revenue while creating grand equity and making the most of your resources...

"We had this term called "lookers to bookers", and this goes back to the use of tracking where really your site can be one big focus group. You know exactly who's getting the hits and where the interest is.

"We could also tell who was coming to the site, looking at our content, and then going into the store. So the pressure came on the executive editor to drive more traffic to the store. You can do that in two ways. You can either market the hell out of the site in the appropriate places, really going after a consumer audience rather than the so-called Asia watchers which was our initial target audience. The other way is to alter your editorial, to make your products and the Asian lifestyle that we were selling more intriguing. We didn't have the budget for the marketing, so it basically came down to changing editorial. That's where I decided to step out, and eventually the whole editorial team was either laid off or quit.

"Today we have the new Channel A which was relaunched today under the Modern Asia Living brand. It's really trying to capture this Asian Martha Stewart space, which is very different than what I intended to set out to create. That's the tale..."

Dan Gillmor, technology columnist for the San Jose Mercury News, wrote a column two years ago about the dilemmas posed for journalists when media companies began forming partnerships, specifically Knight Ridder's partnership with AOL. He says things have only gotten more complicated since:

"These partnerships and alliances raised new interesting problems for people who do journalism, and I'm here representing the cost center side of the operation. That is to say we cost money, we don't bring it in. I also in that column wanted to point out loudly that I was speaking from a very transparent glass house. That we had our own share of these entanglements, and that as far as I could tell we would continue to.

"At the time we were a partner with AOL for Merc Center that ended, and Mercury Center went on the Web, as all of the Knight Ridder papers have done... Knight Ridder was an investor in NetScape. We have since sold that...

"What we were doing on NetScape and other companies in which we had investments was to put in a disclaimer in our stories that said if we wrote something that was substantially about NetScape rather than a peripheral mention, we'd say, Knight Ridder, corporate parent of the Mercury News, is an investor in NetScape, and let readers make whatever they wanted to make of that statement. But it was necessary, we thought, to have these disclosures.

"These are going to get more and more complicated ... not only is this not black and white, it is so infinitely gray ...

"The recent example of the New York Times book review on the Web, which points to the Barnes and Noble site, as I understand it; and as I also understand it, they get a cut if Barnes and Noble sells a book off of that link. That strikes me personally as improper. I don't know what the outcome of that was, but I wouldn't think that's a proper thing to do...

"One of the things that just came up that was alluded to at the start was not a partnership, but a situation that has put, I believe, Knight Ridder into a problematic position ... On Monday there was an announcement of a new coalition that they call ProComp. It's short for some endless thing about... promoting competition in the digital era. The reality of that organization is that it is pretty much designed [to] put a stop to the MicroSoft monopoly kind of organization. That's the fundamental goal, I think... They got Robert Bork, the former appeals judge who wrote the book on why antitrust should almost never be enforced... I thought it was interesting and worth talking about because this is a guy who refused to cut his positions in order to get a seat on the Supreme Court, so he had some credibility in that sense.

"[As] it turned out, I didn't do a column for Tuesday because it developed that Knight Ridder new media was an endorser of this ProComp group.

"Well, I'm struggling with this, but I don't think we should have done that. And I don't think it's wrong for the corporation to take a stand on issues affecting the corporation in the basic, straight forward corporate sense because companies do that sort of thing. We do things as a company, take stands on issues. We provide partner benefits for gay couples. That's a stand on a political issue whether anyone wants to admit it or not.

"The problem for us in the newsroom of the Mercury News, which is in Silicon Valley -- the hometown paper for NetScape, Sun, and a few others that are interested observers and more, is that we're now on their side as a company on this issue. We have a new disclaimer that's going on stories, but I really wish we hadn't done this. I'm trying to find the nicest possible way to say so in a column tomorrow.

"...What I think needs mostly to happen in this infinitely gray world that we're going into is we must, as journalism organizations cover each other with the same zeal that we apply to the other people we cover on these issues of conflicts of interest..."

Dale Peskin, Assistant Managing Editor of the Dallas Morning News, manages the paper's Web site, and previously was Deputy Managing Editor of the Detroit News. 1n 1997 the Dallas Morning News broke on its Web site a major story about the confession of Timothy McVeigh. More recently, it came under criticism because its Web site broke news in the Monica Lewinsky story which it then had to retract. Peskin argued that these instances are the wrong reason to praise or condemn an on-line news product, but they did say something about the speed at which information now travels:

"I'm here essentially because of two stories, and I think that's a little unfortunate. A lot goes on in a newsroom and an on-line publication on a daily basis that over time I think tells about the credibility of that organization and what it means for the news.

"The first story that I'm here to talk about was a story that the Dallas Morning News broke in February 1997 when it reported on its on-line site, DallasNews.com, that Timothy McVeigh had admitted to his defense attorneys that he had indeed bombed the federal building in Oklahoma City and did so to raise a body count. .. We did that about 12 hours before it appeared in our printed publication, and it was widely praised by most people with the exception of some newspapers like the New York Times, that this was the beginning of a new era. That newspapers were back in the "breaking news" business and a media saved. After that we felt we had done mostly the right thing.

"Then about a year later, in January of this year, we published a story on the Internet for about two hours based on several sources that Monica Lewinsky was seen in a compromising position with Bill Clinton, by two people who were in a position to know that information. Most everybody agrees publishing that story was not a very good idea. There were good reasons for that.

"Neither [story] was really about new media and the Internet. The Web didn't make us do it.

"At the Dallas Morning News and in many publications there is a common reporting and editing staff that applies standards and issues, and anybody who knows anything about the Dallas Morning News knows that it's a fairly conservative newspaper that's extraordinarily careful with information that goes through an exhausting checks and balances kind of system of information.

"It worked well in the McVeigh story. It fell apart in the Lewinsky story...

"What was largely reported was that this was a story that was pushed into publication because of the Internet and thus we got it wrong. That wasn't the situation at all. The story was essentially typeset for the first edition of the newspaper and sent to our Web site at the same time and appeared in the first editions of the newspaper, and also went out on the Web site after meeting all the standards.

"This occurs at about 10:00 p.m. Central Time at night... [In the Lewinsky story], the topic of Nightline that very night was the same story, and Ted Koppel began talking with people on his show about this story, as did Larry King.

"In the course of about a half hour, phones were ringing at both the White House and to one of our sources who provided us with that information. By the end of Nightline the source called back and said well, I don't think I really said what you're reporting. So it was a classic case of what we call in the industry "source remorse". After publication a source changes his mind.

"Our standard in this was, and this was a standard that was mostly established during Watergate, of two independent sources who were in a position to know. Between the time we published and the end of Nightline, one of our two sources had changed his mind, so we had no recourse other than to say we're going to pull the story... and it was pulled from the first edition of the newspaper.
"What kind of lessons have we learned about all of this? I think one of the lessons that we learned is the standard for sourcing in old media is not very good, and that standard has changed in our newsroom. We're going to be more careful about that from now on, that maybe two independent sources is not enough -- certainly for a story like this. And there's no question about that.

"But it also I think gave us an indication of things that were the same about new media and things that were different about it. Suddenly we were in a position that information was going to go beyond the range of a delivery truck a lot faster than it travels by print and is distributed to people. That has given us pause to think about the impact that both speed and audience have on a story, and that's changing..."

J. D. Lasica, copy chief, San Francisco Sidewalk and media columnist for The American Journalism Review, argued that while the Dallas Morning News stories may have been justified, the Internet's the sense of urgency to break a story quickly has often outweighed the responsibility to report them thoroughly and accurately. News organization must begin focusing on credibility and accuracy is they want to gain loyal readers:

"Wearing my AJR hat, I have to tell you that I don't think Matt Drudge is the anti-Christ of journalism. He may be the bad boy on the Net, but he certainly does not represent Web journalism as a whole... I know that in some quarters in the Net, in some places on news scripts, Drudge is kind of a hero. There's a certain glamour to Drudge and other sort of lone wolf reporters thumbing their noses not only at big media but also at everything that the mainstream media represent, and that includes its ethical playbook. But I think in the long run that position is going to lose out...

"With all the noise out there--and it's not just on the Net. It's in the entire media soup that we're all swimming in--the public wants journalism that it can trust, and that means news outlets need to reach back to core values of accuracy and credibility and balance. And it means that you need to check what you report instead of reporting before you check..

"What I see happening all too often in news organizations that rush to put unsubstantiated second-hand reports from anonymous sources onto the airways and onto the Net, and I'm not really talking about Dallas because they did have two sources verify this. But I would suggest a couple of things for these news organizations. First, for God's sake, show some backbone. Stand up to sloppy reporting. Draw a line against innuendo and hearsay and speculation masquerading as news. Remember that you're still in the business of truth telling, even if it takes you an extra few minutes or an extra hour to get at the truth.

"Second... I would love to see news organizations use their fact checking machinery to give you users a sort of running tally of what we know or what we don't know about a story, whether it's the White House sex scandal or Princess Di's death or some other breaking news that sort of takes on a life of its own on the Net. Tell us okay, here's what's known, here's what these other outlets have reported but we can't verify, here's what's going on in usernet news groups, and here's what we know to be total bullshit. I think in this age of info-glut, it's not good enough to say "according to published reports". Readers want to know where that report originated so they can make their own judgment about its reliability.

"I want to conclude this part of my remarks with a quote from Ted Koppel who I interviewed last summer in his first interview about the Internet. He said, 'Reporting is not really about let's see who can get the first information to the public as quickly as possible. It's about, let's see who can get the information to the public as soon as we've had a chance to make sure the information is accurate, to weigh it against what we know, to put it in some sort of context. If we're moving into an era in which reporters are pressured to get it on-line before we have a chance to check and edit the material, if speed is the main criteria of putting something on line, then I think that's going to rear up and bite us in the ass.'...

"[On Sidewalk.com], what we've done from the beginning is to sort of give information to people with time compressed lives so they can make better decisions about where to go and what to do in their communities, and we've been very successful. We've launched in nine cities. We plan to reach consumers in a total of 50 markets by the end of this year...

"We've got a staff of two dozen people with backgrounds in magazines, newspapers, Web publications, and the vast majority of those staffers are dedicated entirely to creating great local original content, and all that content comes through my desk and we give it the same rigorous vetting process you'd find at any newspaper copy desk.

"In the past 13 months I've been in roughly like 50,000 meetings, and I can tell you that there is a true separation of church and state that goes on in Sidewalk in the sense that promotion will talk to us in editorial, but they don't tell us what to cover and we don't tell them what to promote. There's no misleading blurring of advertising editorial in our site. It's made clear to the readers that these are contests and promotions and not stories. None of the listings you'll find on our site are bought or paid for by advertisers. Of the more than 5,000 stories and editorial entities on our site, not a single one contains a link bought or paid for by the advertisers.

"Lastly and most importantly, in my view, the San Francisco Sidewalk has editorial integrity... Our mantra from the beginning has been to provide valid, credible, accurate, and honest information to people to help them make their lives easier, and that's how you build loyalty and drive your usage higher, and that loyal and committed readership is what will attract merchants and turn Sidewalk into a profitable, successful business enterprise..."

Kathleen deLaski, Director of News Programming for America Online, one of the largest aggregators of on-line information. She argued that just as the public has come to understand the differences in the type of content that television programs on the same channel offer, the public also must understand that a Web site can hold a wide variety of content. This is O.K. as long as the carrier makes their programming clear:

"[Consider], at 9:00 o'clock a.m. on the CBS affiliate in San Francisco and you see the Jerry Springer show, and then maybe at noon you've got Days of Our Lives, and at 4:00 o'clock you've got Hard Copy; at 7:00 o'clock you've got the CBS Evening News. The viewer knows that these are not in any way related, and that one should not be held at the same level as the other... [Now,] you could hyperlink between all the different shows... from Jerry Springer to Dan Rather. And that's when it becomes a problem.

"So what we've tried to construct at AOL News, and it only works to the extent that the member understands this thing that we're setting up, is that we don't hyperlink to Matt Drudge. That's about the only defense I have as the head of AOL News. I don't link to him, but you can key word to Matt Drudge...

[As an aggregator,] we have very different ethics than our own entertainment channel does. We have certainly different ethics than our shopping channel does. We don't hyperlink to the Barnes and Noble ad from the book review, and in fact I don't think the New York Times does either. The New York Times is one of our partners and their policy on AOL, certainly, and I think it's the same on the Web ... is that there's no hyperlink from the book review in the story. There's a separate, which clearly looks like an advertisement button where you can go to Barnes and Noble. That is the dichotomy that we set up as well. But our shopping center doesn't have that same rule, as they shouldn't. You go there to shop...

"So we have to I think help the consumer understand the difference between the different channels on-line, the same as they would understand the difference between different television shows when they're watching television.
"... AOL News has been around since 1985, and we have six million households -- AOL is 12 million, but six million of those households regularly use the news channel as one of their major news sources, and that's a huge number of people. When you have that kind of an audience you have to take your journalism very seriously -- even though we are not on the street reporting stories. We have to have very strict guidelines and we mirror the guidelines that our partners such as the New York Times and Newsweek and ABC News and AP and Reuters [have], but we have to set up our own guidelines, too, for headline writing and hyperlinking. We try to err on the side of caution since we are a new news brand... We can't afford to misstep in the same way that even, I would submit, the Dallas Morning News can afford a misstep. They have however many years of tradition on their side...

"For instance, we wouldn't point to a story from the Dallas Morning News until one of our news partners has, then that's when we make the... Once it's in the AP, then we point to the AP story, and then we'll hyperlink to the Dallas Morning News. But that's just our rule, that we take the lead of our news partners..."

Kevin McKenna: "As far as the book review, I just wanted to say that I was involved in that decision, and frankly, I think that it was all a question of how it was executed... and I think it's been executed in a way that keeps separate what's editorial and what is revenue deriving for the business side. And we were consulted extensively on the editorial side of both the on-line operation and the newspaper. And we felt that if it was executed in the right way it was clear that no choice of editorial content would be based on anything having to do with the salability... that it passed what we would consider a smell test. But I think there are many cases that would not pass that test and the only , the silver lining I would offer to you is that the editorial side of the operation was extensively consulted and I hope will be consulted the next time it comes up because we may feel it doesn't pass that test."

Kathleen deLaski: "They're not in the book review, they're outside of them on the web site, is that right?"

Kevin McKenna: "They're not within the editorial well, as it were, of a page. They are off in a margin that is meant to specifically reflect that it's not editorial endorsement or content."

Clair Whitmer, features Editor of CNET.com, explained the code of ethics CNET developed. One important standard is how they handle corrections and updates since old versions can so easily be deleted on the Internet:

"[On] the idea that on-line editors are more subject to deadline pressures than other editors. I've worked for dailies, weeklies, monthlies, and now on-line, and my experience has been actually quite the opposite of that. If I'm an editor for a print publication and it's five minutes to deadline, I have five minutes to make the decision about whether or not to run a story. If I'm working on-line, I don't have to make that decision in five minutes. I can stay there for another two or three hours torturing the reporter until I'm satisfied with it, and I'll still have time to beat the morning papers.

"...But it does affect the nature of the scoop. If I post something that I know is an exclusive and five minutes later my competitor posts it up, how is the reader supposed to know where the information came out of first? Even though we put time stamps on there, people aren't comparing that. That is difficult. If you're a newspaper and you have a scoop, you have it for a whole day. If you're on-line and you have a scoop, you can have it for five minutes.
"Back to the code of conduct that we wrote. This happened last fall at some point, and we've posted it to our internal Web site so that all new employees and existing employees can read it. At the time it wasn't intended, I don't think, as a defense mechanism. Everybody that I worked with had come from print publications, and it just felt natural and logical for us to have an on-line equivalent of what we were used to having, a written policy of your code of conduct, your code of ethics.

"Most of [the code] is actually borrowed from what we were used to working with, the written policies that we'd all been working under before for print publications. It covers things like gifts and services and travel, no junkets, you can't hold stock in companies that you cover regularly. Non-disclosure agreements and whether or not we would or would not sign them. These are all things which are common concerns and common problems in trade magazines or any kind of publication.

"There is some stuff, however, in here which we decided was relevant to on-line only and which we came up with... The first thing we decided is that as a company, CNET is not just a publisher, it's also a player in the industry. We do have investments and affiliations with other companies that we cover, and that we would disclose those on each and every reference to one of these companies in our stories. The example is, of course, Intel... And in every story that we do on Intel, we say Intel is an investor in CNET, the computer network.

"I know that Intel doesn't affect our coverage, and I think Intel knows that because we certainly have slammed them many, many times. The disclosure is intended, of course, to let the reader know that Intel has nothing to do with our coverage of them.

"The next section... is about corrections and clarifications. This was something that was a real problem, and is a problem because of mechanics of publishing on the Web. That you can fix stuff. You get it wrong, and you can go in and correct it and it's as if the first version never existed. You can cover your tracks that way if you are so inclined. So we decided that we would not do that, and if there was any question of a fact that was inaccurate or an interpretation of a story, that we wanted to change in substance, that we would post a correction to the Home Page, the front page of our publication, letting the reader know that this story has been changed and this is the problem that was in the story.

"We also keep it permanently in the story that the reader looks at. So if you see a story, it will say at the bottom -- 'Correction. This has changed from the original version.' And then we fess up to what the problem was in the posted correction on the front page. Not all other on-line media is actually doing this.

"...We try to let the reader know if we've updated something. Even if it's not necessarily something that was wrong, but new information has been added, and tell the reader when it was originally reported.

"The other thing is use of hyperlinks. Some of the other panelists have reported hyperlinks being sold to advertisers. CNET doesn't do that. All of our hyperlinks are free to the reader, and we felt like the use of hyperlinks is one of the main benefits of publishing on the Web, so why would we want to get rid of that...

"The policy is that it's up to the editor to decide when to use hyperlinks and when not to. But in practice, what we've decided is to use them whenever possible, to link to everybody so that nobody can say that we're weighting a story by linking more to one side of an issue than to the voices that are representative of the other side in the story.

"However, there are some exceptions. Sometimes we've covered neo-Nazi sites or pornography sites, and we have often decided not to link to them because we don't want to be interpreted as endorsing that material. But again, this is always up to the decision of the editor. We would never sell a hyperlink in our story. But this is the real issue, is that there are other people that would, so we end up being tainted by affiliation, all of us in new media..."
Audience Question: "... I wonder if you could update us on what ASME is deciding on whether to admit on-line journalists as members. Last I heard, that was still being debated."

Phil Lemmons: "Actually, the debate is over and the decision was made to admit them. ASME membership is limited not quite just to chief editors, but to very senior editors, but there's going to be some kind of program to admit those editors.

"... The concern is very small Web sites of every stripe that might not have accepted journalistic standards and therefore might quickly erode the standards that have been built up in the magazine community. So the desire is to integrate the new media editors as fast as possible, but to try to figure out some way to do that without risking the standards."

Audience Question, from Richard Gingras, the At-Home Network: "I work within the midst of a veritable infestation of 26-year-old Harvard MBAs who quite frankly do see this as a new frontier with no rules, who barely recognize that a profession like ours has a code of ethics, and whose own code of ethics is defined by the P&L statement.

"[Mr. Perdue's] notion of us having a code of ethics on our site and very clearly available to everyone makes a tremendous amount of sense... I would extend the proposal beyond the world of the Web, because when I look out at today's traditional media -- print magazines, newspapers and so on -- I don't see these codes of ethics available either. I don't see the masthead of a newspaper saying we have a code of ethics, here's where you can get it... I think if traditional media started doing that as well, we would see carryover effect to the on-line space."

Lewis Perdue: "I think as somebody who's been both a journalist and a publisher where not so much my code of ethics but how to pay the rent was dependent on the P&L, the editorial product is a product... News is your product. When you adulterate your product by making it sleazy in these deals with advertising, you eventually produce an inferior product, which ironically means that you don't have as much to sell advertising against. So the best world for advertising and for profits, and I've been able to show this on a P&L, is good, solid, irresistible, honest journalism..."

J.D. Lasica: "[CNET has] got this really tremendous ethics policy, it's really one of the best I've ever seen... But you won't be able to call it up, or the whole thing up on the Web. I think that's a real mistake. I think even though some of these are sort of isolated kind of pockets of interest to only a few individuals, it greatly adds to any publication's credibility..."

Clair Whitmer: "We are in discussions right now of posting parts of the ethics policy. I'm not sure how much of it, but certainly the parts about our affiliation to the Web site so that there is a permanent archive of who our partners are and who our investors are. This is judged in internal discussions to be the most relevant part of the ethics policies to readers, although I personally... think that it would be a good idea to post the whole thing to the Web site."

J.D. Lasica: "Why don't you post it on your site?"

Clair Whitmer: "It's an internal policy. It's something that is written not for the public, it's written for our employees. If you look at the language of it, it's not intended as a defense of new media. It's intended as very specific guidelines for reporters. What do you do? How do you act? What stocks can you own? How do you use hyperlinks? So the genesis of it was not, as I said earlier, not intended to be a self defense at all, it was intended to be guidelines for our reporters, a management tool..."

Audience Question: "I wanted to share an item that was in the Sacramento Bee recently. There was a TV station in Fresno that sent a mailer to California candidates inviting them to place their photographs and a political statement on their TV station Web site for a price of $300... This is through the marketing department, but the TV station Web site is promoted through the news broadcast. This is the first incident I've heard of, but I'm worried that this could be the beginning of an ugly trend of direct conflict of interest..."

Unidentified voice: "It's an ugly trend that's here... There are newspapers, for instance, that have local Web site directories and these are compiled only from advertisers who agree to buy a certain amount of advertising in the print version. The Santa Rosa Press Democrat being one of those, which is a local newspaper owned by the New York Times. These are not isolated kinds of incidents. These are all over the place. And yes, it is one of those trends that is going to destroy the credibility unless somebody does something about it."

Question: I'd like to add one comment. I think it's more important than ever to try to build credibility because with TV and print, people couldn't go straight to the source. In a lot of cases now people can. If they don't trust us, they have no reason to come to our Web sites or to look at our publications. So the eroding trust of media which I think print and TV have contributed to, now it's more important than ever, more dangerous than ever, just because of the Web.

Think about it... Hillary Clinton, why couldn't she put up her own Web site and put out whatever information she wants and never speak to the press? People could go straight there and hear her side of the story."

Unidentified voice: "That actually happened to us. We wrote a story about Microsoft, and they never contacted us. Not one editor on the staff was contacted that they were disputing facts in the story, but they put up a page on the Microsoft Web site saying the story was wrong."

[top [1]]