John S. Knight Fellowships for Professional Journalists

2001 Knight Lecture: Katrina Heron

Rewriting the Future: Journalism and the Internet

Katrina Heron, Wired Magazine, editor in chief

It is 1995, and having just been cast out of that sylvan realm known as the Knight Fellowship, I have come to Wired magazine as an editor. I need a pen. I look around; I don't see any within reach. I ask someone nearby if she has one.

"Wired doesn't support the use of manual writing instruments." Hallelujah! This pronouncement is followed by a sheepish look: "We bring our own."

One day soon after, walking past the desk of a young editorial assistant, self-provided pen in hand, I am stopped by a "Wow, that's really cool." It is my pen that has attracted his attention. It is bright purple, with a yellow cap. It has a felt tip. I offer it as a gift. "Really? Wow. Thanks." He shows it to the person sitting next to him. A small crowd gathers.

It is the spring of 2001, a time of rebirth - also of rolling layoffs and blackouts. A reporter appears in my office to discuss a story involving Silicon Valley. The reporter has just been on the phone with a partner at Kleiner, Perkins, Caulfield and Byers, the renowned venture capital firm that was at ground zero of the technology boom - and launched the boom.
"So what's new?" I say. He laughs: "That the people who brought us the future are fumbling around in the dark, searching for candles."

The first scene marked my entrance into that world so murkily referred to as "new media," and the second serves, for all of us, I think, as a kind of phase marker. We're living in a moment when some very familiar problems from the past are overtaking a future we had already almost taken for granted. Headline writers are having a field day - "CEO Was The Only Thing On His Resume" is one of my personal favorites - while portfolio shock is the plague upon the land.

The hard times have revived - let's hope only briefly - the incredibly tedious and useless east/west, analog/digital, old-economy/new-economy squabble that, if you can remember that far back, actually prefigured the dot.com boom. But few stand to defend any part of the new today: We hear that the old economy has won. Today, the retro-righteous have their ticker-tape parade, flush with victory over high-tech's fevered and empty promises.

In other words, our capacity for mass idiocy endures. We're not done with excess, we're now just exploring its full negative potential.

As a journalist surveying the technological landscape, it's a tragicomic spectacle. First, we live the boom narrative - Glengarry, Glen Ross plus options ("We're-uniquely-positioned-in-the-IM-space-to-boost-the-introduction-of real-time-communication-into-an-enhanced-knowledge-worker-experience!"). Then comes Judgment Day, wherein high-tech and anyone associated with it reaps the whirlwind. (A recent essay in the New York Times Magazine put it this way: "What started out as the biggest revolution in communications since Gutenberg ends up as a giant yard sale.") And through it all, the established news media does remarkably little honest work on the actual problem, the hard problem: making a future for journalism in the digital age.

Along with many others, I've been debating and exploring this question pretty much obsessively ever since I arrived at Stanford in 1994, having come - late - to the realization that the Internet would change everything about the way we communicate information, ideas, and experience. My discouraging conclusion has been that we're nowhere near fulfilling its promise - or ours.

In fact, that combined promise has in some ways seemed to have steadily receded ever since the Web really took off in the mid-90s. I now know that, late as I was to the party, I'm a member of a bygone generation of Net believers - a group for whom the civic potential of the Net was the central focus. Preoccupation with business models soon became, and remains, a fact of life. The irony is, this may not be the best place to start to build something of lasting value. I shudder to think that for succeeding generations, the Net may merely be the housing for a virtual shopping mall with video.

I remember how in June 1997, when the United States Supreme Court affirmed a lower court ruling and struck down the Communications Decency Act, the decision referred to the Net as "this new marketplace of ideas." In the words of Judge Dalzell, of the District Court that had issued the preliminary injunction against the CDA, the Net was "the most participatory form of mass speech yet developed."

It still is. And yet despite the fact that the US adoption rate for the Internet has been meteoric compared with that for any previous technology, we're more confused and fractured about where we're going and what we should be doing with this new medium than with any other we've ever encountered.

It is a hard problem. After seven exhilarating and incredibly challenging years in the hotbed of the digital revolution, I have no great truths to impart about the future of journalism and the Internet. Instead, I find myself confronted on all sides by frustration, and by its handmaidens: dislocation and paradox - circumstances and moments where the past, present, and potential future meet, collide, overlap and disagree.

At Wired, I've been part of a fantastically ambitious journalistic quest: to report on the future - and, wherever possible, from the future. We believe in visionaries, as hoary as the word now sounds. We would also rather be brave than right. Recent issues of Wired have explored the future of molecular electronics, genetic engineering, the fusing of the biological and information sciences, robotics, the destructive potential of some of these potent technologies, wireless, broadband, PlayStation3 and the Xbox, human cloning, petaflop processing, peer-to-peer networking, computers that simulate protein-folding. My goal as the editor of Wired has been to make readers feel that they're part of a high-order conversation they might not otherwise be able to find.

I guess I found my true job description in something Danny Hillis, who is certainly a visionary, once said. Danny came out of MIT's Artificial Intelligence Lab, cofounded the supercomputer company Thinking Machines - his beautiful description of his work: "I want to design a computer that will be proud of me" - and later did time as a Disney Imagineer, where he cooked up an autonomous robotic dinosaur, among other things. He's cofounded a new company called Applied Minds, which you'll no doubt be hearing more about. Anyway, Danny said that if you wanted to do something fun at MIT, you had to convince them that it was important. And if you wanted to do something important at Disney, you had to convince them that it was fun. In its own way, Wired allows you to do both. And where else does almost every discussion eventually come around to Star Trek?

Wired may have begun life as a trendy niche magazine but it's clear today that it's a general interest magazine for the 21st century. And here we confront one of those paradoxes I mentioned: We deliver the futuristic fruits of our labors each month by horse and buggy. I have a two-and-half-week production cycle, a six-week lead time, and a manufacturing and distribution process that would look comfortingly familiar to Henry Luce.

I love print publishing, and I am insanely frustrated by it. Even if I wanted to do away with it, I couldn't, because we have yet to develop any viable alternative - but the truth is I don't want to give it up. Paper is a magnificent technology, clearly. I just want more: I want new companion media and new distribution channels that exploit the riches of this new realm. The disruptive technologies that we showcase each month in Wired highlight to a ludicrous extreme the limitations of the print box we consign them to. We work within a system that exploits only what was possible, not what is or can be.

In magazine journalism, we are the evolved creation of movable type, high-quality industrial printing technologies, cheap and plentiful materials, and 3rd class postage. In its heyday, this was a revolutionary combination for the transmission of ideas and images. And it is still a profitable business, if a colossally inefficient and wasteful one. In what other industry can you consider yourself successful when you discard more than half of your finished product? (The "sell-through" rate for magazines - i.e. the ratio of units sold on the newsstand to those manufactured, today hovers industrywide at around 35 percent, according to the Wall St. Journal. In 1999 it was 38 percent. Fifty percent is the impossible dream.)

I want journalism to charge full-force into the 21st century - to be a player, not an anachronism. Clearly, we need more than old methods for a new medium. We need a new interface.

What's holding us up? The print establishment innovates mostly defensively - and in any case, as we know, change rarely comes from the current industry leaders. (Stop reading this now and go directly to "The Innovator's Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail," by Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen. His book will tell you much more than I can about the causes and consequences of the predicament we're in.) Just look at book publishing: Amazon may have upended the principles of inventory and supply chain for retail, but the publishing beast still lumbers on, largely oblivious to the radically changing landscape all around it.

Yes, the next business model is elusive. Years before the dogfood.coms of the world became the stuff of millennial gloom and schadenfreude, we were learning how much we didn't know about how to reinvent ourselves online. The translation key continues to elude us: Whether it's the ambitious recasting of a traditional magazine format or the repurposed, refreshed guts of a gold-standard newspaper, it is still true that most of the people won't pay online most of the time for what they will gladly purchase on paper all of the time. Sites like the Wall St. Journal's offer the few exceptions that prove the rule. The biggest publishing story of the latter half of the 1990s was not digital, but rather the surge in print-magazine launches (Folio magazine says there were 870 in 2000 alone.) The death of paper? Hardly. And if we think the ad-sales model for print publishing looks vulnerable today, we need only take a closer look at the online one to return to our senses.

We've made progress - we're more sophisticated in our understanding of the Net as a medium. We get that its frictionless interface is also inherently a slippery one; that speed allows us - maybe encourages us - as consumers to be fickle.

We know that micropayments, registries, subscriptions are a pain in the ass: Just Click Away.

We're struggling to deal with application overload - a much more pernicious condition than information overload. The host of Net-related technologies coming at us fast and furious is hard to keep track of, often incompatible, and - gasp - buggy. You haven't lived till you've seen the head of a chip fab wrestle to reconfigure the preferences on a recalcitrant cellphone, or watched a programming wunderkind get driven into San Francisco bay by state-of-the-art GPS. You feel a kind of grim satisfaction in these moments, mixed with terror.

We're also now keenly aware of the more complicated and interesting problems. The native agnosticism of the Net makes it a challenging medium in which to uphold our professional standards: You can't depend on this tool, much less enlist it, to serve the cause of accuracy, authenticity, or reliability. Excellence will be amplified; so will error.

A lot of smart people also believe, by the way, that Net-related technologies are hurting journalism by de-professionalizing it. It's a commonplace that you can prove this in two syllables: Matt Drudge. I think it's clearly true that the profession has been broken open, by virtue of the fact that the Net is a profoundly democratizing tool - and I'm all for it. I remember Russell Baker, in a speech here at Stanford, recalling how much more fun journalism was back when it was still just a job. I never knew it then, but I wish I had. Professions love the pause button.

Which is, I think, why there's still so much heated, if irrelevant, debate in the established news media about who should be "in charge" of gathering, vetting, and conveying information, and whether consumers' relationships with established brands still count. I think they do, and will. But I think we should hope for a more dynamic future relationship between news media and consumers, in which small and medium-sized players also count and, critically, from which a broader and richer variety of information is expected. I'm going to wax irrationally exuberant later on about how new technologies can recreate our mission - you can't escape! - but fundamentally, the promise of the Net has always been the same, and simple: massive, unprecedented connectivity. Global connectivity. "This new marketplace of ideas." A way of linking people from all over the world with information and ideas that would otherwise languish in closed systems. A feedback loop. A truly intelligent network. The prospect of becoming smarter and making better decisions as a result of this open system.

Interestingly, if unsurprisingly, this tremendous force is felt and valued most in countries where there exist no stable or protected press freedoms. We take a lot for granted in the United States. In some ways we haven't yet proved that we deserve the Net, though it was born here.

How are we going to handle all this connectivity? "Information management systems" to the rescue! But wait. While we do need a means of organizing the current onslaught of information, and while there will be ever more to organize in the future, we should exert greater influence on the process; the Net makes this possible in a way that other mass media haven't. We have become accustomed to outsourcing our own judgment. Filtering tools, from flesh-and-blood editors to individualized applications, will be plentiful. Amid the bounty, let's not forget the original and still highly worthwhile filtering tool: the human brain. Or rather, the brain in partnership with the biggest idea to come along since email: smart search.

Two journalists we should all greatly admire today are Sergay Brin and Larry Page. You don't know them as journalists, maybe because they don't think of themselves that way. They're the founders of Google, one of the most ambitious search companies around. Google was born here at Stanford, where both Sergay and Larry were computer science grad students - the original Google server, circa 1995, is now a museum piece, and you can go look at it in the basement of the Gates Computer Science building here on campus.

By the spring of 2001, Google was processing 100 million search requests each day. It's an amazing, groundbreaking tool - as are many of the search engines. But it's when you look at the future of search that things start to get really interesting. "Content aggregator" has become an ugly phrase (well, it was pretty ugly to begin with). Think of Google as a budding muckraker, a youthful narrative genius. Even today, you can sense its nascent capacity for intelligent news-gathering and filtering, for joining the conversation. It has a unique capacity to partner with, build on and extend the best traditions of established news media.

The Holy Grail for Google, as one member of the team recently told Wired, is the Star Trek Computer (see? there it is). You'll talk to it. You'll tell it what you need to know, it'll go zooming through the entirety of the galaxy's knowledge banks and serve you up a perfectly distilled answer. But just imagine the more mundane possibilities in a program that could sort and deliver, like a personal editor or some kind of divine clipping service, the choicest material written on a given subject.

Already, the Net makes it possible for us to triangulate, to become hunters and gatherers of knowledge on a massive - and massively efficient - scale. Anyone who has had any experience researching a topic on the Net already knows that the process is instantly self-sustaining. Once you start, you realize you already knew how to do it. You also realize how amazingly unduplicable this act is in any other medium. It feels like magic. Only connect.
We know that health-related search is leading the way for consumers. Probably most people here tonight have had occasion to research a medical issue online. I did this mostly recently just a couple of weeks ago, when a very dear friend of mine, a war correspondent for the Sunday Times of London, was hit by shrapnel in Sri Lanka. She was lying in a hospital bed in Colombo with a severe eye injury, and I was asking Google to help me learn about sympathetic ophthalmia. In an hour I had enough information and directed questions to make my friend a participant in her surgical treatment. (Meanwhile, the story she filed from her hospital, posted on the Sunday Times' web site, spurred interest from international relief agencies in the plight of civilians living in the rebel-held territory of northern Sri Lanka.)

None of us would go into an operation without getting a second, and maybe even a third, opinion. I hope we're entering the era of second-opinion ubiquity. It's a world where fewer people will expect or want their information to come from a single source, and where fewer big players get to hog the spotlight. There are some interesting atavistic aspects to this scenario - we're talking about individualized webs that are built, as in days of old, upon personal evaluations and judgments. Epinions.com, the Web forum for reviews of just about anything, calls its information network a "web of trust." It's a good phrase. You already have the very crude beginnings of your webs of trust in the bookmarks you actually return to and in the email lists you actually read. Smart search and webs of trust - a double helix.

But back to why we're stuck. If you're a glutton for punishment, you can wrestle with the really Big Problems the Net offers - like the fact that the applications we're using today and developing for near-term use will in all likelihood be obsolete in the future. This mega-problem is referred to fondly as the Digital Dark Ages. Stewart Brand was talking about this the other day. Stewart is - well, he's another person you can't really capture in a resume of any kind, but he cofounded the Well and the Global Business Network, and before that he was the founder and editor/publisher of the Whole Earth Catalog - and way before that he was a Merry Prankster. Stewart remarked the other day that anthropologists of the future are going to be pretty disappointed in us. "They will shake their heads at the fact that we started digitizing our culture at the same time that we started recycling," he said - because the combined effect will be the erasure of all record of our civilization from about 1985 onward.

By the way, another Big Problem that Stewart identified fell victim to the Net's penchant for error-amplification. In fact, it occurred to me that probably the most valuable contribution I could make this evening would be to try to correct this one pervasive misapprehension. I'm sure you've heard the phrase: "Information wants to be free." I'm embarrassed to tell you that it has appeared just that way more than a few times in Wired. It dates to the fall of 1984, when Stewart participated in a hacker's conference, and it quickly became a rallying cry among hackers, taking off on the Net. OK, here's what Stewart really said - and this quote comes from a book, published three years later, that unfortunately did nothing to publicly restore his full insight:

"Information Wants To Be Free. Information also wants to be expensive. Information wants to be free because it has become so cheap to distribute, copy, and recombine - too cheap to meter. It wants to be expensive because it can be immeasurably valuable to the recipient. That tension will not go away. It leads to endless wrenching debate about price, copyright, 'intellectual property,' the moral rightness of casual distribution, because each round of new devices makes the tension worse, not better."

Hello, Napster.

I remember a friend of mine complaining rather hilariously, a few years ago, about how long and futile the search was for the ideal mate. Someone in the group said, rather lamely, "Well, but just imagine how wonderful that moment will be when the perfect person walks in." And my friend said, "Yeah, because I'm going to be shouting, YOU'RE LATE!"

Maybe the most frustrating thing about being stuck in this period of confusion as a journalist is that it feels like such a betrayal of our potential, in the words of the television pioneer Reuven Frank, to "transmit experience." Why should video gamers be having all the fun? We're alive in an era of unprecedented innovation in communication tools. We could be working and playing with these tools, and refining them and learning from them. They may even be better suited to humans' synaptical tastes than traditional interfaces. We know they are interactive, upgradable, hyperlinkable, fluid, dynamic, transformative. We know they will be widely available, and cheap. And that we'll have the juice to do whatever we want with them, in optical and high-speed wireless networking.

Why aren't journalists and publishers experimenting more with these new tools? We could go down the road here in Palo Alto to Xerox PARC, where Rich Gold, the manager of Research in Experimental Documents, is doing amazing and wonderful things with all kinds of book interfaces, for example.

Thomas Krens, the man who brought motorcycles and Giorgio Armani - not to mention Frank Gehry - to the Guggenheim, said something recently that reflects this passion and drive to make new connections. "We live in a non-linear world," he said. "So let's complicate the way we tell and listen to stories." It made me wish he had decided to remake magazines instead of museums.

It's so hard to find a band of heretics when you need them.

But I've been keeping myself busy in the meantime. Actually, I just finished editing my last issue of Wired, sort of. It turns out I will do a couple more - but the June issue really was my swan song. This issue contains two features involving independent thinkers of great renown who also possess great wisdom and experience, and who, as it happens, are great friends.

Andy Grove, who as you know is the longtime leader, now chair, of Intel is our cover story, in a wonderful interview about the crisis high-tech is in now - a subject to which he brings, among other things, a rare historical perspective. The sense of dislocation I felt at writing the coverline for this issue, by the way, was immense: It says, "Believe In The Internet More Than Ever." Shouldn't that be obvious by now? But somehow, in this moment, it seemed to bear repeating.

I want to read you a portion of the interview, where Andy Grove is talking about the quality of leadership at a juncture - all too familiar in Silicon Valley - where the future of your company, and perhaps your industry, is at stake; where you can't go back and you can't stand still, but you have no map to where you're going. Keep in mind as I'm reading that these words are being uttered by the eminence grise of one of the biggest and most important companies in the world:

"I kinda have this little movie playing in my mind of people riding down one side of a mountain," he says. "They know that there is another mountain out there someplace that they want to get up on top of, but they are stuck in the middle. Think of a hazy Death Valley where you can't really make out the two sides. You kind of ride in a particular direction and you start to get concerned about whether you know where you are going. And in that situation the leader of the group of riders becomes far more important than at other times. Because people look to him to stick his neck out and decide on a direction-which they have to decide, because if they don't they will start breaking up and debating which way they're gonna go and they're going to die of thirst. The demand on this mystical leadership ability to drive toward a relatively ill-defined destination - and the need to instill the conviction in the group to keep going - is greatest when you're in the middle of that valley, and you know that you can't go back where you came from, but you can't really see the other side that clearly.

"I have a vague memory of a guide in the last century bringing pioneers across the prairie. If I remember right his name was Lassen-the guy Lassen Peak was named after. And the irony was, he always got confused between Shasta and Lassen Peak. So I kind of picture all these miserable pioneers following him, believing that he knew where he was going, and they got across somehow, even though he couldn't tell the difference between Lassen and Shasta.
"When you are in a strategic transformation, you kind of get lost. Part of you would want to retreat back to doing what you know how to do, because it's familiar, you know what you're good at, you know where the problems are. But your intellect tells you that's not where you really want to be. So you strike out in a new direction."

In this same issue we have a story about a company in Warren Buffett's stable, a fractional-jet-ownership outfit called NetJets. As a side-result of that piece, I went to the Berkshire Hathaway annual meeting last month. It was a lively contrast to the high-tech conferences that are my usual tour of duty. Both crowds, given the chance, will eat ice-cream bars for lunch, but in Omaha, you get Dairy Queen. I had heard that Warren Buffett was a genius, but I knew it was true when I realized Berkshire Hathaway owns DQ.

When you go to this thing, you understand immediately why Buffett is a folk hero, quite apart from his staggering investment record. Thousands of people come to hang out from dawn till dusk and chat and tell jokes and trade stories about their kids, who are right there with them, and no one talks about computer viruses or the Nasdaq. When Buffett spoke, which he did in a Q&A format for a marathon five hours, it was kind of fascinating to compare his sharp and wise commentary with that of high-tech leaders in commensurate roles. At one point, he said, "We're under no pressure to do anything dumb." There are very few, if any, Silicon Valley leaders, who have the luxury of saying that.

On the plane I had been reading Buffett's letter in the annual report - at one point he talks about Aesop and his "enduring, though somewhat incomplete, investment insight" - which was, of course, that "a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush." He goes on to aver that "Aesop's investment axiom…expanded and converted into dollars, is immutable."

Now, Buffett is not in the business of building the future - and need I add, he has famously shunned technology holdings. He likes to pick industries where the costly mistakes have, with any luck, already been made and a secure course is set. (And then, he doesn't run the companies, he buys them and the leaders who built them, as he is the first to point out.) He makes an ungodly amount of money doing this, and he has taught and guided a lot of other fortunate people to do the same. He also, quite amazingly, has managed to create a culture around this jackpot mentality that is considerably greater than the sum of its zeroes.

Sitting there in that vast auditorium with my quiescently frozen lunch, surrounded by people far more intelligent than I - for they owned Berkshire Hathaway shares, while I was a mere tourist - I felt a great surge of admiration for this community, for its stability and durability, for its reckoning with more than one kind of value. These people had their feet on the ground.

And at the same time, I realized I felt homesick; homesick for the community we cover in Wired and for the leaders who are always having to take chances that may turn out to be dangerously dumb - and who will keep taking them. Homesick for those who are striking out in a new direction. Homesick for the predicament of change.

So I rewrote Aesop, in the spirit of that quest: "A hand in the bush is worth two on the bird."

It was homesickness for what can be.