7
THE NET AND THE NEWS

Joel Dinerstein has always been an avid consumer of alternative media. Yet he never needed it as urgently as in the late summer of 2005, when he evacuated his home in the Uptown neighborhood of New Orleans just hours before Hurricane Katrina hit. Dinerstein, a former rock critic who is now on the faculty at Tulane University, shuttered his doors and windows and said good-bye to his neighbors before driving to Austin, Texas, to take refuge with friends. Though safely out of Katrina’s deadly reach, Dinerstein was emotionally unmoored and gripped by a need to know what was happening to the people and places that anchored his life. New Orleans was no Minot, of course—the hurricane was the world’s biggest news story. Dinerstein listened to radio reports on the long drive to Austin and watched the continuous television coverage from his hosts’ living room. The national news coverage, he told me from back home in the bayou, was visually powerful yet also misleading and incomplete. “I didn’t trust the coverage. It seemed like the reporters were just hanging out in the French Quarter and taking helicopter rides. It was clear that the national media knew nothing about New Orleans—culturally, socially, racially. I didn’t believe a lot of the stuff they were reporting—the looting, the violence, the idea that most people here were turning on each other.”1

Like most Americans, Dinerstein appreciated the aggressive political journalism coming from the networks and cable news outlets, and he understood why they focused so heavily on the spectacular scenes at the Superdome, the Convention Center, the Ninth Ward, and the French Quarter. Like most New Orleanians, however, he was frustrated by how difficult it was to get reliable information about the other parts of the city, including his own. “The images were weird because they never showed Uptown,” his neighborhood. “And there was no reporting about it on TV either.” Calling his friends and neighbors who had stayed was not an option, because they all had lost cell phone service when the towers were knocked out, and their land lines were dead.2 Most of his e-mail contacts were unreachable, too, since many local servers were down (Tulane’s would be out for about six weeks), making messages to local addresses undeliverable. “There was no way to get in touch with other people from New Orleans. I couldn’t get news about them, and they couldn’t get news about me. That was really disorienting.”

Lacking information about the fate of his friends, Dinerstein sought out primary news reporting from journalists who knew New Orleans and personal testimonies from people around Uptown and Tulane. Had the hurricane hit ten years earlier or in a less developed part of the world, it might have been impossible to get anything like this. But in 2005 Dinerstein could connect to the Internet, where the Times-Picayune’s Nola.com published both a frequently updated, online version of the daily newspaper—rich with local journalism that would ultimately win major national awards, including a Pulitzer—and a digital bulletin board where anyone could post or retrieve information.³ With a few keystrokes, Dinerstein could download streaming video from WWL-TV, the only New Orleans station that offered continuous broadcasting and webcasting of its news coverage, staffed by local anchors with familiar faces and street-level knowledge that made for more dependable reporting about different neighborhoods and communities. Here, for example, is an exchange between Eric Paulson, a twenty-eight-year veteran of New Orleans news television, and Sally Ann-Roberts, who sat in a Baton Rouge studio and described images shot from a helicopter on a webcast around 10:00 a.m. on August 31.

“There’s Reverend Green’s church. It was under water.”

“Oh my!”

“Now we should be coming up on that agricultural center.”

“We’re by city park, we’re by the stables.”

“There’s two condo developments, the Lake Marina Tower, and then that new one.”

“There’s the Joe’s Crab Shack, there’s the Southern Yacht Club.”

“There’s the Orleans Marina. I used to have a boat there.”

“A very good friend of mine lives in one of those boat houses there.”

“Oh my.”4

Although it’s unclear how many New Orleanians were watching this exchange online, those who did must have felt a little closer to home.

The Internet allowed traditional media such as WWL-TV and the Times-Picayune to maintain operations when other broadcast towers were down and printing presses inaccessible, and to reach audiences far outside the city limits. But the Internet’s more innovative role involved providing an outlet for new communication platforms, such as blogs, digital bulletin boards, and listservs, which ordinary people could use to post or receive vital information, much of it hyperlocal and intensely personal. Hours after the hurricane touched down in the Gulf region, Craigslist became a central hub for offers of housing assistance and calls for information about missing persons: “Share House in NH for Hurricane Katrina Family.” “Any info on Biloxi High—Missing Mom.” “Looking for Brenda or Brad Kava.” “I can call your friends/family and let them know you are safe.” The blogosphere lit up with several thousand posts about Katrina, some containing little more than short comments or links to major media reports, others providing more of the firsthand observations and raw images that Dinerstein was seeking.

Soon after the hurricane hit New Orleans, NOLA.com became the major clearing house for accounts of ground-level conditions in all parts of the flooded city, as well as photographs, desperate requests for information about missing people, celebratory reports of loved ones found, and offers of assistance from California to Vermont. The Web site featured reporting by the Times-Picayune staff at its center, while on the margins it provided links to discussion forums for twenty different neighborhoods and special pages for “Missing Persons,” “Survival Stories,” “Pet Rescue,” “Reach Out,” “I’m OK Forum,” “Homes Available,” “Volunteer,” “Sound Off,” and “In Memoriam.” The site attracted interest from all over the world, providing possibilities for human connection to those who might otherwise have experienced the disaster as a distant event. Yet its major impact was local. As Dinerstein explained, “NOLA.com operated as something of a public forum for New Orleanians through September and October, and it continues in that capacity as people decide whether and when to return.” By December 2005 there were roughly 6,700 original posts, and thousands more responses, on the Uptown section alone.

For the large community associated with Tulane University (students, parents, faculty, staff, and alumni), a new site called Tulane Student Blog emerged as the primary place for debating the immediate and long-term future of the institution. Brett Hyman, a rising senior with unusually fierce enthusiasm for his school, began the blog on August 31, two days after the hurricane made landfall, by posting photographs of Uptown and imploring fellow students to take caution before enrolling in other universities. Hours later, he produced an entry headlined “Don’t Transfer!!” “Tulane needs us,” he wrote. “If too many of us transfer, they’ll lose tons of money and it will bring them down, significantly.” For those worried about the security of their homes near campus, Hyman provided a report from his brother, who had stayed in the area. “During his walk he saw no looted buildings anywhere. No evidence of vandals or roving gangs. Increased presence of National Guard and police. Uptown seems quiet and peaceful. Drew cannot stress highly enough how on his walk through major and side streets he has not seen any looting or suspicious activity. Perhaps if somebody left a 12-pack of cold beer on their front steps, it would go missing, but other than that, there has been no looting of residences that he has observed. Drew expects that looting is probably happening in some places, but it is grossly exaggerated by the media.”

LONG BEFORE KATRINA PROVED ITS VALUE, EXECUTIVES AT BIG MEDIA companies and their allies on Capitol Hill insisted that the Internet was the source for so many novel sources of news and information that it rendered most policies regulating ownership of old media—television, radio, and newspapers—absurd. How could any one media company—even if it did own the local newspaper, one of the four network affiliates, and eight radio stations—monopolize the news market when the Internet offered consumers countless additional options? As NBC vice president R. Robert Okun argued when asked about whether the FCC should cut ownership restrictions on television stations in 2003, “There’s so much competition out there, so many choices you could probably take the cap off.”5 Senior Research Fellow James Gattuso of the Heritage Foundation went a step farther, arguing that ownership caps actually harm the public. “Rather than media monopolies,” he wrote, “consumers face a bewildering and unprecedented amount of choice. Instead, the real danger to Americans is that outdated and unnecessary FCC restrictions will limit improvements in media markets and technologies, limiting the benefits that they can provide.”⁶ This position inspired the ambitious policy agenda of then FCC commissioner Michael Powell. As he told the USC Annenberg’s Online Journalism Review, “Contrary to the popular discourse about media I actually think we’re awash. I say to my staff, ‘I guarantee you with all the stuff that we have that no significant news event can happen in the world and we’re probably less than 20 minutes from hearing about it.’ … It’s pretty remarkable that I can go to Google News and immediately have 4,000 sources of news from all around the world. The breadth of access gives me a perspective that’s pretty fascinating.”⁷

Thanks to digital technologies, satellite services, and the extraordinary range of content available online, Americans with home Internet access enjoy unprecedented levels of diversity in the global marketplace of ideas. Policy makers would be irresponsible if they did not carefully consider how the smorgasbord of content available online has changed the way traditional media works. But the matter is not so simple. One problem is that the digital divide between those who have and those who do not have access to the Internet is deeper than we generally recognize. According to the Center for the Digital Future at the University of Southern California, about 21 percent of the population did not use the Internet at all during 2005; 33 percent of U.S. households lack a home Internet connection, and among those that do, less than half have a high-speed connection that facilitates easy access to video and audio streams. It is common knowledge that wealthy and highly educated citizens are more likely than others to have Internet access, and that whites and Asian Americans are more likely to have home access than African Americans and Latinos. They are also more skilled at using it, and thereby more capable of accessing the news, information, and services available online. According to recent communications research, the educated and affluent are more likely to find new sources of information and entertainment on the Net, whereas less educated and affluent users tend to restrict their visits to Big Media and commercial outlets.8

While it is apparent that the Internet is not as ubiquitous as media chiefs claim, neither is it as rich and reliable a source of local news as its enthusiasts often say. The Net, after all, is designed to transcend terrestrial distance so that users can connect to faraway people and places, and for that reason many communications experts have defined it as an “antilocal” medium. The Katrina crisis helped to reveal how some of the extraordinary innovations in new media content can contribute to the vitality of civil society, and even in noncrisis situations there are countless examples of new Web sites that enrich local offerings. Yet the celebratory rhetoric about the rise of grassroots journalists, bloggers, and the revolutionary potential of the Internet threatens to obscure the fact that Big Media companies are harnessing the Web to amplify their voices as never before. Despite the recent emergence of exciting online local projects, the idea that new technology has rendered the dangers of consolidation obsolete is the greatest and most dangerous media policy myth of the digital age.

BIG MEDIA DOMINATES THE WEB. ACCORDING TO THE PROJECT FOR excellence in Journalism’s (PEJ) 2006 State of the Media report: “The Internet has long been known for a seemingly unlimited number of news sites from across the political spectrum. The most popular sites, however, are generally associated with the media establishment. Of the top 20 Nielsen/NetRatings sites in 2005, 17 were associated with traditional news companies—those that produce most of their content offline for newspapers, television, or magazines.” The top ten news Web sites for December 2005, as measured by the number of unique visitors, were as follows: Yahoo News, 24.6 million; MSNBC, 22.9 million; CNN, 20.9 million; AOL, 14.7 million; Internet Broadcasting Systems (which webcasts television segments from network affiliates and other major broadcast companies), 12.9 million; Gannett, 11.5 million; New York Times, 10.9 million; Tribune newspapers, 10.5 million; Knight Ridder Digital, 9.9 million; USA Today, 9.9 million.⁹ New media giants such as Yahoo, AOL, and IBS join the major networks, cable stations, and newspaper chains on the list, but they don’t supply much original content. As Gene Kimmelman, the director of the Consumers Union, explains, “The internet is a wonderful source of news and information. A small percentage of consumers rely upon it. When the FCC asked them where do they go? More than half go to broadcast.com. The next largest segment go to newspaper.com. It’s the same sources of news and information using a new technology, a new medium, but it is not more diversity of viewpoints, it’s not more competition in the media.”10

Even Big Media moguls and fiercely libertarian publishers are concerned about the way conglomerates are establishing dominance on the Net. Barry Diller, the executive who helped create Fox Broadcasting Company, ran ABC Entertainment, Paramount, and Vivendi Universal, and went on to become the chairman and CEO of USA Interactive (whose holdings include the Home Shopping Network and Ticketmaster), predicts as much. “The same thing is going to happen in the Internet that has happened essentially to our other mass-communications pipelines. You can already see at Comcast and others the beginnings of efforts to control the home pages that their consumers plug into. It’s for one reason: to create a toll bridge or turnstile through which others must pay to go. The inevitable result of that, without any question, is that every domino will fall.”¹¹

Although Big Media companies have developed elaborate plans for channeling Internet traffic to their Web sites, most have not made major investments in original reporting, particularly at the local level. The majority of online news content consists of repackaged wire service articles and syndicated newspaper stories, and most daily newspapers use the Web primarily to republish print articles rather than offering interactive or multimedia products. New media giants such as Yahoo, AOL, and IBS rely almost entirely on news supplied by other organizations, while bland, brief stories from wire services such as the Associated Press and Reuters constitute about three-fourths of the content at ABC.com and three-fifths of the content at both Fox.com and MSNBC.com. Even top newspaper companies, such as the New York Times and the Washington Post, make heavy use of wire services for their Web sites so that they can provide up-to-the-minute content, effectively publishing lower-quality news that they would never print on paper.

Major media companies have transformed the vast open space of the Internet into an enormous echo chamber, with the same stories reverberating in site after site without a significant uptick in original journalism. Lacking a strong business model for Internet news, media managers at leading Web sites actually reduced the professional staffs for editing, rewriting, and localizing wire copy between 2003 and 2004. The result: roughly three of every five wire-service stories posted on the sites studied was unedited by the sites’ own employees. The PEJ, which analyzed 1,903 news articles published by nine leading online news sites, concluded that “the content they offer on the Web, while improving in volume, timeliness and technological sophistication, remains still significantly a morgue for wire copy, second-hand material and recycled stories from the morning paper.”12

THE LACK OF PROFESSIONAL JOURNALISTS WHO FACT-CHECK, EDIT, OR add reporting to the prepackaged stories that circulate through the most popular Internet sites is a key source of the central problem with news published online: its unreliability. So much news first reported on the Internet is inaccurate that readers are reluctant to trust it unless it comes from a proven, and usually “old media,” news company. Of course, the Internet does not have a monopoly on fabricated or misleading journalism. The scandals involving errant or outright fake reporting by Jayson Blair and Judith Miller (of the New York Times), Stephen Glass (of the New Republic), and Jack Kelley (of USA Today) proved that the highest-profile and most respected American news outlets are vulnerable to gross violations of journalistic ethics. These cases remain exceptional, however, and the dramatic internal investigations and severe punishments for faulty or fabricated reporting reflect the industry’s commitment to enforcing professional norms.¹³

Americans’ reluctance to trust Internet news sources, especially those that come from individuals, bloggers, and less established brands, is not unfounded. Anyone who has surfed to the fringes of the Web knows that most small sites offer more opinion than reporting and conform only vaguely to contemporary journalistic standards. Where did Wal-Mart and its public relations firm, Edelman, go to find outlets willing to print, sometimes verbatim, the controversial company’s promotional copy as if it were straight news or opinion, or to republish scripted self-praise for the chain’s role in Katrina relief projects? Where did the self-proclaimed new media journalists spread the story about Jews planning September 11 and warning four thousand members of their faith to avoid work at the World Trade Center that morning? The Web, of course, which is why even Dan Gillmor, whose book We the Media champions the revolutionary capacity of “grassroots journalism,” recognizes that “for manipulators, con artists, gossips, and jokesters of all varieties, the Internet is the medium from heaven.”14

In countless cases, even professional reporters have been duped, taking inaccurate stories from Internet sources and republishing them in the mainstream media. In December 2005, for example, a Los Angeles Times reporter named Julie Cart found a story about Wyoming governor Dave Freudenthal, who apparently reversed a successful effort to reintroduce endangered wolves into the state by refusing to respect the Endangered Species Act, declaring that the state “now considers the wolf as a federal dog,” unprotected by law. The Times published a report on the wolves on its front page, only to learn that the Internet story about Freudenthal’s decree was a hoax, posted as an April Fool’s joke by someone who never expected it to reach journalists in one of the nation’s most esteemed publications, let alone appear on page one. In its “For the Record” section the next day, the Tribune Company-owned paper that had eliminated so much of its editorial staff acknowledged that “an article in Tuesday’s Section A about tensions over the federal effort to reintroduce wolves into parts of the West wrongly attributed to Wyoming Gov. Dave Freudenthal a statement that Wyoming considered the Endangered Species Act no longer in force and ‘now considers the wolf as a federal dog.’”¹⁵

The Los Angeles Times was hardly the first major organization to be duped. False Web reports about issues that affect the economy, from the assassination of Bill Gates to product updates for pharmaceutical companies such as Cel Sci and fake reports of an SEC investigation into the accounting practices of Emulex Corporation, have shaken up stock markets after credible television and Internet news sources repeated them.

Sometimes the hoaxes enter U.S. elections. During a debate between U.S. Senate candidates Hillary Rodham Clinton and Rick Lazio in October 2000, New York’s WCBS-TV reporter Marcia Kramer demanded that they both declare how they stood on “Federal Bill 602P.” Clinton, dumbstruck, said, “I have no idea.” Then Kramer responded: “I’m going to tell you what it is. Under the bill that’s now before Congress, the U.S. Postal Service would be able to bill e-mail users five cents for each e-mail they send even though the post office provides no service. They want this to help recoup losses of about $230 million a year because of the proliferation of e-mails. But if you just send 10 e-mails a day, that would cost consumers an extra $180 a year. So I’m wondering if you would vote for this bill.” Both Clinton and Lazio opposed the proposal, with Lazio denouncing it as “an example of the government’s greedy hand in trying to take money from taxpayers that, frankly, it has no right to.” The candidates had good reason to be disturbed—but not about Bill 602P, which was a complete fiction, and in fact one of the most popular urban legends spread online. In one common version of the hoax, the bill is supposedly sponsored by a mythical congressman named Tony Schnell, endorsed by a Washingtonian editorial that was never written, and opposed by a nonexistent law firm at a fictitious address.16 Although countless e-mail messages and Web sites exist to warn readers about the hoax and inform them that there is no Bill 602P, no one let WCBS know.

Government agencies have proven credulous, too, resulting in unnecessary health scares that undermine trust in public officials and media alike. In March 2004, officials in Aliso Viejo, California, grew so concerned about an Internet report on the dangers of dihydrogen monoxide that they debated banning Styrofoam cups, which use the chemical in production. The Web site that presents the report offers dire warnings about the compound: “Dihydrogen monoxide is colorless, odorless, tasteless, and kills uncounted thousands of people every year … Most of these deaths are caused by accidental inhalation of DHMO, but the dangers of dihydrogen monoxide do not end there. Prolonged exposure to its solid form causes severe tissue damage. Symptoms of DHMO ingestion can include excessive sweating and urination, and possibly a bloated feeling, nausea, vomiting and body electrolyte imbalance. For those who have become dependent, DHMO withdrawal means certain death.”¹⁷ More than 3 million people have visited the site, where they can read about DHMO and cancer, the Enviro Impact of DHMO, and use of DHMO in the dairy industry. The messages are alarming—“Found in every lake, river, and ocean”; “It’s a major part of acid rain”—until one realizes dihydrogen monoxide is, in fact, H₂O (or water) and that the Web site is an educational satire, designed by the Villanova University computer science professor Tom Way. Officials in Aliso Viejo learned that they had been duped before they voted to limit the town’s use of water, and today they know to treat news on the Net more skeptically.

Even the most fervent Web enthusiasts believe that the suspicions generated by fake Internet stories drive browsers looking for “real” news to the Web sites produced by major media brands, thereby amplifying their voices. As Gillmor, the grassroots journalism advocate, conceded, “The flood of unreliable information on the Net could have the ironic effect of reinforcing the influence of Big Media, at least in the short term.”18

IN MOST CITIES, WEB SITES RUN BY NEWSPAPER COMPANIES ARE THE most popular sources of online local news and information, and they will remain so as long as they provide access to print journalism for free. Yet innovative Internet journalistic projects are beginning to pave new ground in city reporting, covering stories not treated in traditional news outlets, and sometimes even beating daily papers on routine local stories that they now lack the staff to get. In New York City, for example, a nonprofit research, education, and advocacy organization called the Citizens Union Foundation (which is connected to the Citizens Union, a good-government group founded in 1897) launched the Gotham Gazette, a Web site “that would provide one-stop shopping for persons interested in the public policies and civic life of New York City,” in September 1999.¹⁹ Jonathan Mandell, its tireless editor and a third-generation New York journalist, joked that the site, which is animated by cartoon graphics, is “named after the newspaper that Batman reads.”²⁰ With a five-person editorial staff and an annual budget of around $500,000, which comes from grants and pledge drives, the Gazette publishes a daily digest with links to key stories from the city’s unusually rich supply of local news outlets (dailies, weeklies, monthlies, and Internet publications); original reporting on a broad range of civic, cultural, and political issues; guest columns from prominent public officials, scholars, and journalists; a city calendar; a book club page; a classifieds section; links to popular local Web sites and blogs; and many special features, such as a budget explainer, interactive city maps, and educational computer games that simulate city planning problems.

The Gazette is a remarkably rich publication, which is why about seventy thousand unique users visit its site each month and more than ten thousand subscribers signed up to receive “The Eye-Opener,” a daily e-mail that highlights the morning’s biggest stories, including those covered by the major commercial media and some that the top outlets miss. The Web site began winning accolades and online journalism awards soon after it began publishing, but the Gazette really proved its value during the most difficult year in New York City’s recent history, 2001, before September. As Mandell explained in an e-mail, “We offered the most comprehensive coverage of the local races in 2001, a year in which term limits kicked out three-quarters of the elected officials in New York City, and a new campaign finance formula attracted hundreds of ‘citizen-candidates,’ most of whom had never run for office before.”21 As usual, local television stations did not offer sufficient airtime for the four hundred or so aspiring candidates who wished to publicize their positions, while the major newspapers and magazines offered sporadic, uneven coverage of the seventy city races. The Gazette created “Searchlight on Campaign 2001,” which blended its digest model with issue-driven original coverage, links to political parties, government offices, nonpartisan policy organizations, and columnists, as well as district-level information pages and a separate page for each individual race. The public-service project won an Innovator Award from the Pew Center for Civic Journalism, became a regular feature during election years, and emerged as a model for community Web sites in other cities.

When terrorists attacked the World Trade Center on 9/11, Gazette staffers heard the impact from their office, which was close to the Twin Towers. Although everyone was forced to evacuate, the producers managed to post some original coverage by 4:30 p.m., and by September 12 they built a message board where visitors could check on the status of friends and relatives or express their concerns. Because most of New York City retained electricity after the disaster, residents used the Internet to get news and communicate with others, and the Gazette operated much like NOLA.com would four years later. The Gazette played a key role in consolidating information about New York City after 9/11, when city residents and officials began debating difficult questions about how to rebuild. According to Mandell: “From the beginning, when New Yorkers talked of rebuilding, they were defining it in many different ways. Some meant the physical reconstruction just of the 16 acres known as Ground Zero; others, the economic recovery of Lower Manhattan or of all of New York City. Still others were talking about the spiritual and psychological recovery of the city’s residents, or the efforts at restoring the feeling and the fact of safety and security, or the process of memorializing and of creating a memorial. We organized Rebuilding NYC to help New Yorkers understand these distinctions, with what have now grown to be 10 different topic sections.”22 In 2002 the Gazette won the Online News Association’s award for service journalism by an independent organization for its Rebuilding NYC project (it had been a finalist for the Searchlight 2001 project), and the next year it won the top prize, for general excellence in online journalism.

CIVIC WEB SITES MAY BE ESPECIALLY USEFUL DURING CRISES, BUT A growing number of citizens and political officials are finding that they can also make government more effective in normal times. Today the overwhelming majority of elected local officials—about 73 percent—regularly go online to communicate with their constituents and learn about public opinion, and the majority of adult Internet users—some 97 million Americans—e-mail officials or go to government Web sites to participate in civic affairs.²³ Citizens have good reason to take advantage of “e-government” Web sites. Done well, the sites offer a level of information about public services, programs, and issues that has never before been so easily available. In Washington, D.C., for example, the www.dc.gov site gives residents, prospective business owners, and tourists a comprehensive overview of city life and works as a portal into civic affairs. The clearly written site features vital information about local schools, crime issues, taxes, and transit conditions; allows residents to make important and otherwise time-consuming transactions, such as renewing a driver’s license, requesting an identification card, or paying a parking ticket; offers a special service request center, an emergency center, an education center, and interactive programs through which users can make personalized maps or get driving and Metro directions to any part of the Capitol.

Not that www.dc.gov provides citizens with a full toolbox for civic participation. E-government sites usually contain no direct links to critical local journalism or to reports by independent organizations, and they do more to promote than to check the power of local agencies and officials. If the mayor is investigated for a felony crime, police officers abuse a private citizen, city council members make backroom deals with developers, or the school system fails to educate children, www.dc.gov is hardly the place to learn about what happened. Some official government sites provide links to the personal sites of elected officials, where, as New York voters recently discovered, politicians can use their Web sites to alter news stories about their record. During William Weld’s short-lived run for New York governor in 2006, the New York Times reported that his staff republished “sanitized” versions of two newspaper articles in the “News” section of his site, “removing all negative phrases about him, like ‘mini-slump’ and ‘dogged by an investigation,’ and passages about his political problems.” When questioned, a Weld spokesman justified the practice by “comparing it to selecting positive blurbs to run in movie advertisements.”²⁴

In Washington, D.C.’s middle-class and affluent neighborhoods, dozens of organizations have developed hyperlocal Web sites and discussion forums for sharing information and reinvigorating collective participation around every conceivable neighborhood issue and event. More than one thousand residents in Mount Pleasant, an ethnically diverse neighborhood of thirteen thousand in the central north part of Washington, D.C., known for its architect-designed row houses and apartment buildings, go to their neighborhood site, www.mtpleasantdc.org, to find services (from baby-sitting to computer consulting), learn about city schools, search for housing, plan opposition to unpopular development plans, or simply gossip about parochial concerns. Registered participants drive the action on the discussion forum, which has become a main artery for civic engagement. In 2005, for example, residents posted thirty-nine messages in a debate over a controversial ban on single sales of beer in local liquor stores, forty-six about new parking regulations, fifty-four about a private club in a neighborhood house, fifty-seven about a proposal to build a bikeway to Rock Creek Park, and eighty-three about cars running through red lights at a busy intersection. Sometimes the debates are more urgent. When Greg Shipe, a thirty-four-year-old resident, was killed in a drive-by shooting while walking his dog, the online discussion—about gun control, local policing tactics, public drinking, and neighborhood community ties—attracted about ten thousand total visits from concerned participants.

NEIGHBORHOOD WEB SITES HELP TO ENCOURAGE CIVIC PARTICIPATION, but citizens searching for something that resembles original journalism are more likely to find it in the blogosphere, where, among the thousands of sites dedicated to politics, professions, and all matter of personal subjects, a small but active set of independent publishers are posting intensely local content—firsthand observations, neighborhood stories, critical reports, and candid photographs—from their PCs. In New York City, where some residents brag about spending most of their time and money within a few streets around their apartment, there are blogs covering microneighborhoods that span a block or two.

A weblog, write the blogging political scientists Daniel Drezner and Henry Ferrell, is “a web page with minimal to no external editing, providing online commentary, periodically updated and presented in reverse chronological order, with hyperlinks to other online sources.”25 But Gothamist, a metropolitan blog covering all of New York City, is expanding the meaning of the term. Gothamist was founded by Jake Dobkin, a Park Slope native who told me he had “never left New York for more than ten weeks at any one time,” and Jen Chung, who manages the site when not working in an ad agency. The pair became close friends as Columbia University undergraduates and then began instantmessaging each other with stories about the city when they joined the network of the bored at work—young professionals who surf the Web while putting in long hours on the job.

“Jen is a media maven,” Dobkin, a hipster with an MBA from New York University, told me while sipping mint tea in a SoHo café near his apartment. “She absorbs everything, especially about culture and the arts, and she’s a local news junkie, too. I’m interested in weird things: signage, graffiti, alt culture, and stuff in the paper that just seems quirky. We were sending way too much of this to each other on IM and e-mail, and in 2002 we started putting some of it on my Web site. Our friends would comment on it. Then we realized that what we were doing was interesting to more people. Blogs weren’t big in New York, but I knew about them from work I had done in San Francisco, and I found some lightweight content management software that a company called Blogger gave away for free. I created a site called Gothamist and moved our content there in February 2003. There weren’t many local blogs anywhere then, but Jen and I were interested in the kind of local stuff that would go into a metro paper, and we just started posting.”

Gothamist took off, attracting young, highly educated readers who liked the quirky commentary and edgy cultural coverage Chung and Dobkin offered, and getting boosts from other blogs, such as Gawker, which linked to the site. “Gothamist has three main elements,” Dobkin explained. “One-third is metacoverage, where we aggregate stories from the mainstream media and amplify the most interesting or overlooked items. One-third is original content. And one-third is user-generated content, stuff we get from reader tips and comments.” Although neither Dobkin nor Chung has a background in journalism, Dobkin said, “We’re serious newspaper readers, and that helps us, because we have an appreciation for what stories and issues are important for our readers. We’re filling a void, especially for people our age, whose issues and interests weren’t being addressed by the dailies.”

They also have a good eye for cultural activities as they first surface on local streets. In June 2005 Gothamist began praising an unknown Brooklyn and Philadelphia band called Clap Your Hands Say Yeah!—even inviting them to promote their self-produced, eponymous CD in Gothamist’s “Movable Hype” concert series. When the band broke out later that year, making the Rolling Stone Hot List, landing a feature story on NPR, selling twenty-five thousand copies of their album, and filling up concert venues wherever they played, they cited Gothamist’s attention as a major boost.26 “We’ve always been able to spot small stories that blow up into city wide or even national news,” Dobkin told me. “Look at the Sony graffiti ad campaign story. I was walking in my neighborhood and I saw these spray-painted ads for PlayStation all over the place. I shot it and posted it as an editorial.”

“This week,” wrote Dobkin, “Sony PlayStation graffiti pieces have been popping up like cancer all over Manhattan. The pieces are sometimes drawn by hand—others are wheat pasted to walls all over SoHo and NoLita. It’s clearly a large campaign, and deserves a thoughtful, measured response. Here’s mine: corporate graffiti sucks. Sucks! Sucks! Sucks! It sucks for a variety of specific reasons: 1. It’s exploitive … 2. It’s fake … 3. It’s deceptive … 4. It is not positive brand association … 5. Neighborhoods don’t like it … 6. It’s illegal … In conclusion: please cut this crap out.”27 The message resonated. Within a month, the local, national, and even international media were covering the issue, with Wired, the Washington Post, and the BBC among the many outlets filing reports. It turned out that Sony had launched the graffiti ad campaign in cities throughout the country, and, once it became public, officials and residents demanded that the company take the ads down. Not only did Sony ignore the complaints; it pushed the campaign even deeper into New York City life. On January 26, 2006, Gothamist reported that “Sony is now advertising on human skin, by co-opting those little stamps they use at clubs … Nothing classier than getting branded with some marketing company’s artwork! This is definitely worse than the graffiti. At least there they were only messing with our neighborhood walls. Now they are using your skin as their advertising substrate. Disgusting, Sony—just really, really gross.”²⁸

Gothamist also covers local politics, from the mayoral election to the transit worker strike, by summarizing and editorializing about news stories, and by linking key reports from the major media. “Our site doesn’t work well unless there is a lot of mainstream local media in town, because our metacoverage depends on it,” Dobkin said. “Some people think that we’d be worried about competition from newspapers and other blogs. But this is not a zero-sum game. The more good stories there are, the better we can serve our readers.” Gothamist readers can always comment on a story. Yet as the site became popular, many aspiring writers wanted to do their own original posts, too. The publishers, who had been doing about seven stories a day, were eager to grow. Since both had other full-time responsibilities, they welcomed new contributors. The site expanded, reaching about twenty-five new posts per day by 2005, taking on a part-time staff of two dozen (whom they pay, on average, under ten dollars per post), and attracting roughly one hundred thousand unique users each month. Today, Dobkin explained, “Gothamist has tentacles everywhere. Every neighborhood in New York City has at least one Gothamist reader, and in most places we have people who send comments and tips. If a fire starts in Manhattan, we’ll have photos online within minutes. Our readers play a big role in content production. They send us story ideas and pictures, and they have fun doing it.” Advertisers also want to participate. “At first they approached us,” Dobkin explained. “We didn’t really know how to handle the business, but we learned fast. After I finished business school I decided to work on Gothamist full-time, and I’m trying to get Jen to join me, too.”

By 2006 Chung had a real incentive to make Gothamist her regular vocation: She and Dobkin had created Gothamist LLC, and in the previous two years they had used the New York model to start fourteen other local blogs, in cities from San Francisco (www.sfist.com) to Toronto (www.torontoist.com), London to Shanghai. Dobkin said he never intended to create a local blog brand, but in late 2003 Rachelle Bowden, a friend of theirs who was moving to Chicago, asked if they would help her start Chicagoist. “There weren’t many costs for us,” Dobkin said, “so we agreed to support her and pay the operating costs. Rachelle would be responsible for the content, and we would split the advertising revenues fifty-fifty. Although Chicago had a few local blogs, there was nothing like what we did, and Chicagoist became a hit.” From there the expansion unfolded quickly. “There are a lot of cities with young people who want good local content, and we were getting requests from writers and editors who asked if they could work with us. We started LAist, which was rough because the editor soon left to work on John Kerry’s campaign and we had to search for a replacement. But in D.C. and San Francisco it worked smoothly from the outset, and in London, Paris, and Shanghai it’s going well, too.”

For now, Dobkin and Chung are hands-off managers. Local editors are fully responsible for content on the cityist blogs they publish; they need only guarantee that all the content is locally relevant, and that contributors do city coverage rather than the kind of personal writing that is so common online. Yet Dobkin understands the media business, and he recognizes the potential value of an Internet publication with a proven record of reaching the young, well-educated, and upwardly mobile professionals whom the newspaper industry cannot attract. “We’ll never be able to do the long-form reporting that the mainstream media does,” he acknowledged. “No one is going to do a five-thousand-word piece for Gothamist. We’re not going to cover all the big local institutions, city hall, the schools, businesses, and the like. But the short, quickly written stories work much better for us than they do for the dailies and the alt weeklies. Soon every major publication is going to be blogging. That’s just a fact. They won’t be able to take the risks we take. They won’t have our authenticity. So I wouldn’t be surprised if they came to us and asked if we’d be willing to sell our business.”

LOCAL BLOGGERS CAN MAKE AN IMMEDIATE IMPACT IN SMALL TOWNS and suburbs, where self-publishers with deep community ties are beginning to cover news and publicize issues that thinly staffed, chain suburban weeklies fail to see. In suburban New Jersey, a novelist, freelance journalist, and former newspaper columnist named Debra Galant started Baristanet, a blog about the towns of Bloomfield, Glen Ridge, and Montclair. (Galant chose the web address www.baristanet.com in an effort to create a virtual coffee bar.) She came up with the idea after learning about local blogging at a “meet-up,” a social event organized online. Initially she partnered with Glen Ridge mayor Carl Bergmanson, with each investing three thousand dollars, Galant taking all editorial responsibilities, and Bergmanson handling the business. The arrangement didn’t work, though, and Bergmanson sold his interest to Laura Eveleth, who threw herself into the project, selling ads and registering the site as a limited liability corporation. Soon they took on another partner, the Montclair resident and freelance journalist Liz George, and then hired a part-time writer, Annette Batson. The three content producers, all of whom work from home, take responsibility for updating the site and monitoring content on different days of the week. Along with the main content, they added a “Happenings” page with highlights of local cultural events, a food section with restaurant listings and reviews, a classifieds section, and a popular real estate page. Although Montclair and Bloomfield have well-regarded weekly newspapers, Glen Ridge actually has two, and all three towns have established Internet discussion forums, Baristanet has found its niche, especially among the more urbane residents who get most of their news from the New York Times or Wall Street Journal and appreciate the blog’s approach to local affairs.

When we met at Montclair’s Café Eclectic on a crisp January afternoon, the stylish mother of two teenagers was waiting patiently, cloaked in a fur-trimmed jacket with her cell phone, car keys, and designer notebook displayed on the table. Were it not for her slightly mischievous smile, I would not have identified Galant as the keen observer and biting social critic who has shaken up Essex County, where she has lived for seventeen years, with incisive posts about the mismanagement of municipal services, misbehavior in the schools, and speculation and fights over development in the local real estate market that are the open secrets of suburban life.

In 2005, for example, Baristanet caused a stir by reporting that the manager of the local public swimming pool had been taking the lifeguard staff to the movies instead of opening the facility on a day when storms gave way to sunny skies, leaving flustered parents calling town hall from behind the closed gates. “In December we broke a story that came from my daughter, who goes to Glen Ridge High School,” Galant told me. “It’s the same school that had the famous rape case in 1989, when a bunch of guys raped a mentally retarded girl.”29 Some students formed a hip-hop group called Porno Hate Train. They circulated one song with insults and sexually explicit lyrics naming other kids, and another with outrageously racist remarks about the victims of Katrina. Baristanet’s brief post, published on December 2, included lyrics from the eponymous “The Hate Train” song.

It’s gross that people in your city smell like baboons
You’re living in shit and mad disease
and you all blame the President
Bitch nigger please³⁰

The report shocked local residents, including parents of Glen Ridge students who had not learned details about the hateful raps that some of their children had written before reading about them online, and sparked an outpouring of comments about the state of the town. The Star-Ledger, New Jersey’s leading regional daily newspaper, picked up the story after Baristanet because the beat reporter Phil Read checks the site regularly. “The kids involved threatened us,” said Galant. “They posted a comment on the blog that they would find out where we live and come after us. They egged our house, too. My daughter, who’s seventeen, threw herself into the argument. But my son, who’s thirteen, asked me to stop because one of his friends told him that her mother didn’t like me. I told him that we had to stand up to bullies, though, and he accepted that.”

If on occasion Baristanet breaks a big story, with news from traffic accidents or photographs from crime scenes taken after readers provide tips, more often it depends on the mainstream media for its news reports. “We get Google News alerts for all three towns,” Galant told me. “The local newspapers cover the town council and Board of Education meetings. We could never do that. We actually have a “Scooped by Phil Read” page, with a link to his stories in the Star-Ledger. We might be able to compete if we had resources to have a real news staff. But that’s not my goal.”

Neither does Galant aim to practice pristine, by-the-book journalism. Baristanet plugs local businesses whose proprietors give its producers free products and services, and doesn’t disclose whether the message is a paid advertisement or an independent review. “What could be better than a hot stone massage at Harmony Day Spa?” says a post from May 2006. “They let us try one for free, and though a massage fan, the Barista had never indulged in hot stone before. It felt like hot wax pouring down our back, in a good way. The atmosphere is elegant, clean and slightly New Age … Tell them you heard about them on Baristanet.”31 The site indulges in small-town gossip, whether about home sales or prominent personalities. Galant explained: “We get Google News alerts for all the local celebrities: Bobbi Brown, Michael Strahan, Tom Cruise [who’s from Glen Ridge]. We wanted to make the site like a small Village Voice, something that would be lively and culturally useful. Now the site lights up whenever something happens. It has news, entertainment, and a discussion board. And we have enough income to give the grunt work to other people and focus on content. Some people gave me a hard time when I started this. My brother, who’s very successful, told me that I was wasting my time doing something so local. But people like it. I’m having fun. And at this point I don’t think I could give it up.”

WHAT BARISTANET AND GOTHAMIST HAVE IN COMMON IS THAT THEY ARE supplemental sources of news and information for communities that are already well served by the mainstream media, and they succeed as businesses because they attract advertisers looking for new ways to reach young or affluent consumers. For the rest of the country, the more pressing problem is that the communities that have the most to gain from Internet news sources are the least likely to have them. Until Internet access and computer literacy are distributed more equitably, there is real danger that local Internet sites, from e-government tools to neighborhood forums and blogs, will—contrary to the intentions of their founders—exacerbate inequalities among American communities, adding new resources for advantaged citizens to participate in democratic institutions or assert their claims to services, while letting the disadvantaged sink deeper into the digital divide.

Consider the uses of Internet discussion forums, which have proven to be especially valuable for citizens during moments of crisis. Approximately forty-five minutes after Greg Shipe was murdered in Mount Pleasant, a thirty-two-year-old African American named Michael Lanham was killed on the streets of Southeast Washington, a poor and segregated neighborhood just a few miles away. Coverage of the two killings was dramatically different in the major local newspaper. As the Washington Post ombudsman Michael Getler noted, a 528-word story about the Mount Pleasant homicide “went on the front page of Monday’s Metro section. There were quotes from neighbors, from a classmate at Vanderbilt University’s business school, and from D.C. council member Jim Graham (D-Ward 1), who said it was a ‘horrible event’ and the first fatal shooting in Mount Pleasant in almost two years.” For the Southeast Washington murder, however, a 56-word, “three-sentence story appeared in the Metro in Brief column.”32 Few readers would be surprised by such disparate treatment by the major media, yet the story does not end here. Southeast Washington has neither the density of local bloggers one finds in more affluent neighborhoods, nor a popular Internet forum where residents can organize vigils, demand better services, communicate directly with local police officers, or debate how to better protect themselves on the streets. While their neighbors in Mount Pleasant used the Internet to discuss how to improve conditions in their traumatized neighborhood, the residents of Southeast Washington had nowhere to go on the Net.

The D.C. story is no anomaly. Four months after Katrina hit, Joel Dinerstein could learn about Uptown and the neighboring Garden district by reading any one of the 9,120 original posts, not to mention the even greater number of responses they generated from participants in their collective NOLA.com neighborhood forum. Yet there was far less information for displaced or returned residents interested in learning about conditions in the city’s less prosperous communities. As of late May 2006, for example, there were only 2,506 original posts in Treme and the Sixth through Ninth Wards combined, and a mere 709 in Gentilly. Michael Tisserand, who was the editor of the New Orleans Gambit Weekly at the time of the hurricane and had to evacuate with his family, told me, “We learned how much easier it was to get assistance from FEMA by filing claims on the Internet rather than on the telephone, which was almost impossible. Lots of government services that were hard to line up in person or on the phone were available online. Those of us who had Internet access had a huge advantage.”

Most Americans, regardless of neighborhood, city, or region, agree that the Internet is a remarkable technology, one that has already changed the media ecosystem and is certain to continue transforming it as more television and radio programs are transmitted online. But the Internet’s echo chamber effect, its susceptibility to misinformation, and the deepening digital divide illustrate a point that media historians have made repeatedly through the generations: new technologies do not eliminate the need for carefully crafted regulations that prevent a small number of giant companies from dominating the marketplace.33 In fact, they make such regulations all the more urgent. Today the challenge is doubly daunting, because not only are policy makers responsible for creating conditions that promote a wealth and diversity of local content, but they must also ensure that all Americans have equal opportunity to participate in their community’s political and civic life. Increasingly, this means treating Internet access as an essential public utility, tantamount to delivering water, gas, and electricity. As a growing number of citizens are arguing, the future of democratic citizenship depends on it.