If you’ve ventured onto the Net, your past may follow you in ways you’d never imagine

This piece appeared on the cover of the Washington Post’s Outlook section and in Salon magazine in November 1998.

By J.D. Lasica

Our past now follows us as never before. For centuries, refugees sailed the Atlantic to start new lives. Easterners pulled up stakes and moved west to California. Today, reinvention and second chances come less easily. You may leave town, but your electronic shadow stays behind, as anyone who has ventured onto the Internet well knows.

We often view the Internet as a communication medium or an information-retrieval tool, but it’s also a powerful archiving medium that takes snapshots of our digital lives — and can store those fleeting images forever.

Not only are official documents and consumer profiles being collected on each of us, but the very essence of our daily online existence: Our political opinions, prejudices, religious beliefs, sexual tastes and personal quirks are all becoming part of an immense, organic media soup that is congealing into a permanent public record. What is different about the digital archiving phenomenon is that our beliefs, habits and indiscretions are being preserved for anyone to see — friends, relatives, rivals, lovers, neighbors, bosses, landlords, even obsessed stalkers.

Take all those homespun Web pages out there. People assume that their home pages disappear once they pull the plug. Not necessarily. While your browser may report a “404: File Not Found” when you call up an offline Web page, those pages live on in other electronic nooks and crannies. Since 1996, the Internet Archive, a kind of digital warehouse, has been trolling the Web and hoarding everything it comes across — text, images, sound clips. Every two months, it scoops up the entire Web and stores the results on its virtual shelves. It has preserved my expired site, and it may well have yours.

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With a turn toward commerce, Microsoft’s online city guide places marketing above journalism

This column appeared in the November 1998 issue of The American Journalism Review.

By J.D. Lasica

Remember those apocalyptic headlines two years ago, the ones predicting that plague and pestilence would be visited upon all that journalism holds sacred because of Microsoft’s emergence as a media player?

As it turned out, toads did not rain from the sky.

Such fears always stuck me as wildly overblown. And today, MSNBC and Slate notwithstanding, it should be clear from its online actions that Microsoft is positioning itself as an Internet transaction center — but has no appetite to reinvent itself as a media company.

Local news? Never gonna happen. The culture gap between a technology company and a news organization is breathtakingly large.

I fell into that gap in April 1997 when I became a senior editor with San Francisco Sidewalk, Microsoft’s online city guide. At the time, I believed that newspapers were in the best position to win in the local online space because of the deep talent and knowledge pool in their newsrooms and their longtime ties to the community.

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