Archives for June 1998

Cruising the Greek islands

June 20, 1998 by JD Lasica

A honeymoon cruise through Santorini, Crete and Naxos, with an itinerary culled from the Internet

This article — one of the earliest pieces on using the Internet for travel recommendations — appeared in the Miami Herald, Philadelphia Inquirer, Pittsburgh Post Gazette and Torrance (Calif.) Daily Breeze in 1998 and the San Francisco Examiner (entire Travel cover), Chicago Tribune, Newsday, New Orleans Times Picayune, Buffalo News and the Rocky Mountain News in 1997.

CRETE, Greece — Xerxes had led us astray.

Xerxes, the nom de Net of a wired wayfarer on the Internet, had advised my wife and me by e-mail to bypass the resorts on Crete’s northern coast and head straight for the island’s hilly heartland.

“To capture the real soul of Greece, avoid the tourist traps and hit the smaller villages,” he (or she) wrote. “You’ll love Skalini. I’m sure there are rooms to rent there.”

Well, no, as we discovered to our dismay. [Read more…] about Cruising the Greek islands

The Web: A new channel for investigative journalism

June 8, 1998 by JD Lasica

Salon’s groundbreaking stories on the Starr investigation challenge the Beltway media’s conventional wisdom

This article appeared in the June 1998 issue of The American Journalism Review as a sidebar to Salon: The best zine on the Net?

For years, the mainstream media have taken shots at the Internet for allowing anyone to spread rumors, lies and conspiracy theories to a global audience of millions. But now the flip side of that equation is beginning to emerge: The Net is becoming an alternative channel for original, honest investigative journalism shut out of the mainstream press.

Salon’s coverage of the Clinton-Lewinsky matter — its first sustained foray into classic investigative journalism — has served as a counterweight to the mainstream news media’s wolfpack mindset. That contrarian approach earned it a swipe by Chris Bury of ABC’s “Nightline,” who suggested on the air in late February that Salon’s findings, which poke holes in the accounts of many of President Clinton’s accusers, were part of a “White House public relations” strategy. [Read more…] about The Web: A new channel for investigative journalism

Salon: The best pure-play Web publication?

June 8, 1998 by JD Lasica

Salon may be a harbinger of journalism’s future on the Internet

This in-depth profile of Salon magazine appeared in the June 1998 issue of The American Journalism Review.

When the editors of Salon heard the reports about the White House sex scandal on the morning of January 21, their daily newspaper instincts kicked into overdrive.

Andrew Ross, who caught the news on the radio over breakfast, surfed the Web for the latest developments and banged out a 630-word commentary from home that went up on Salon’s site before noon.

Editor David Talbot, news editor Gary Kamiya and the rest of the newsroom went into “standard journalistic feeding frenzy mode,” Kamiya recalls. By the time the exhausted staff trudged home that night, they had reported, written, designed and posted the following pieces for that evening’s edition:

• The first detailed report on the contents of Linda Tripp’s tapes, based on Washington correspondent Jonathan Broder’s interview with literary agent Lucianne Goldberg. [Read more…] about Salon: The best pure-play Web publication?

The Net has forgotten how to forget

June 7, 1998 by JD Lasica

The digital attic has begun collecting and storing scraps of our lives — forever

This column appeared in the June 1998 issue of The American Journalism Review. For a more thorough look at this issue, see my article in Salon (with errant formatting given that they’ve switched publishing systems).

Gigabytes have been written about the digital revolution, but little attention has been paid to one of its most potentially profound social changes: The Internet doesn’t forget. Memories fade, but electronic archives are turning fleeting snapshots of our past lives into permanent records that may follow us forever.

And that has enormous consequences for us as communicators, journalists and citizens.

The common perception is that the Web is a fragile creature filled with dead links, “404 Not Found” error messages, hasty e-mails and other transient digital debris. Indeed, leading figures on the Net have bemoaned the wholesale loss of the Web’s early years, such as many of the political sites devoted to the ’96 election.

But efforts are under way to change all that. Brewster Kahle of San Francisco, inventor of several Internet search engines, is trying to collect, store and catalog the entire World Wide Web and all 33,000 Usenet newsgroups. Kahle’s nonprofit Internet Archive and more recent Alexa project are out to become the modern equivalent of the Library of Alexandria: the repository of all the world’s public digital information. To date he’s copied and stored some 8 trillion bytes of words, images and sounds (compared to 20 trillion in the Library of Congress). [Read more…] about The Net has forgotten how to forget

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