What’s better than one newspaper online? How about hundreds at one Web site address. NewsWorks is not the first but represents the most prestigious newspapers embarking into the digital panarama.
The collective conscience of America’s newspapers is now centrally retrievable. Subjects are faster and more easily found. This amalgamate might be the advertiser-attracting forum for the stodgy yet complacent media of hot metal type, ink and paper.
John Kennedy was one of our best-read presidents, devouring reports, dozens of morning newspapers at 1200 words per minute, all before breakfast.
His was a skill few people, now or since, can match. Reading only the news that matches our interests, a single massive collection of diverse print resources over the Internet, is better.
NewsWorks, the premiere product of New Century Network, is a partnership of the nine largest newspaper publishing companies: Advance Publications, Chicago Tribune, Cox Newspapers, Gannett, Hearst, Knight-Ridder, New York Times, Times-Mirror, and Washington Post.
Diverse news subjects and points of view are online: politics, crime, editorials, features, business, finance, sports, entertainment, fashion, and music.
NewsWorks brandishes a quilt of daily news and information from around the country. 135 U.S. newspapers are participating on the Web at <www.newsworks.com>, fed by more than 25,000 skilled journalists. The aggregate newspapers’ business content would be a ferocious competitor to the Wall Street Journal, presently without a serious challenger.
NewsWorks launched this month, July ‘97. In three year its creator, New Century Network, garnered the ownership of nine media powerhouses. But its detractors are the owners and affiliates themselves. Anxious and somewhat hostile, they are challenged by this new metaphor. The conservative, maybe stodgy, newsprint publishers are predictably uncertain about the unknown venture at unseen consequences.
They fear: former rival competitiveness; inequitable financial compensation structures to the information vendors; and uncertain acceptance of the unleashed distribution process. Newspapers could undercut the project while appearing to support it by sending only second-rate stories, embargo content or squabble about story placement.
Duplication of the same articles found elsewhere on the Net is already commonplace. A grocery supermarket has, for better or worse, replaced the mom & pop country store. One-stop shopping is perceived to provide the greater selection in one place; fast, convenient, and unreservedly better.
Conventional Internet search engines now feature single searches of multiple single Web sites. The clammor is for a collectively concise information parcel without being, again, a mantle too ineffectively burdensome. The increasing popularity of this approach compliments our busy lives.
In theory, potentially superior content should translate into increased traffic, and thus boosted advertising sales. The bean-counters expect a value paid for their information, but most of the Net is still free.
The New York Times strategy as a network of local papers regard themselves as the “paper of record in the country” lessened by this consortium. The Chicago Tribune is posting content while discussing affiliation agreement for interactive media, text with a difference.
Other well-established news indexes include TotalNEWS, Excite’s News Tracker, Nando’s NewsWatcher and Yahoo Headlines.
NewsWorks summaries news, but TotalNEWS uses links to its 1,350 sources. NewsWorks does not position banner ads across their page top, thus less obtrusive than TotalNEWS.
NewsWorks’ editor-in-chief John Papanek says, “The other sites
merely list headlines. We are creating news packages, not just a site. It’s
a studio creating content linked directly from affiliate sites.