97.06.11
Group Therapy
For victims of HIV and AIDS, a Web site that offers hope in community.
97.06.04
What's Cooking
The next big thing ... for the kitchen.
97.05.28
Small World
A site where "who you know" is the only thing that matters.
97.05.14
"If you build it they will come..."
Baseball legends live on at RedSox.com's site of dreams.
97.05.07
Journey to the Microwilderness
Slime mold has never looked so beautiful.
97.04.30
A Poem a Day
With National Poetry Month behind us, a new site offers poetry lovers a
daily fix.
For more, see the complete Web Citations Index.
As TV and the Internet become more intimately
intertwined, the most commonly expressed fear is that the Web will become
like TV. But as the recent launch of ABCNews.com demonstrates, when it comes
to broadcast-news networks moving to the Web the result is something else
entirely.When ABC News launched its 24-hour Internet news service last month, it followed in the footsteps of other giants NBC and Microsoft, which had combined forces in 1996 to create MSNBC, and CNN, which led the way the year before with CNN Interactive. All three sites provide breaking-news updates throughout the day, along with a full range of news packages and in-depth features. All three also supplement articles with various multimedia sidebars: primarily brief audio and video clips from their respective TV broadcasts. For now, however, and until streaming audio and video technology on the Web catch up with the kind of quality TV viewers expect, these multimedia "enhancements" are merely adornments, flickering promises of what's to come.
These sites resemble nothing so much as the Web sites of major newspapers
(such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Los Angeles Times); in
fact they have almost nothing in common with network-TV news (except for
the news itself). Just about all of the information is provided as text:
headlines and article summaries, accompanied by still photographs, lead to
newspaper-length articles surrounded by links to more text, in the form of
additional articles and background information, research and educational
resources. All the context (and more) that was pared away when the news
moved from print to radio to TV is miraculously restored.
It is probably realistic to assume that the metamorphosis of broadcast news
we see today on the Web is only temporary, to be wiped away by the
inevitable marriage of the PC and the TV, and the arrival of TV-quality
sound and video carried into people's homes via the Internet. But it's
awfully tempting to hope that the Web and the expectations of online news
consumers will leave a permanent mark on our news media -- in the form of
the kind of depth and background that only the written word makes possible
-- and will influence the way we learn about the events and issues that
will shape our future.Copyright © 1997 by The Atlantic Monthly Company. All rights reserved.
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