Is the jig up for honest search results?

This column appeared July 23, 2001, in the Online Journalism Review. Here’s the version on the OJR site.

By J.D. Lasica

Many of us in the new media industry have watched in despair during the past few months as several major search engines have abandoned all pretense at editorial integrity by adopting deceptive, misleading advertising practices at the expense of their users.

Finally, someone has stood up and said, Enough is enough. And now it’s time for the rest of us to join the battle as well.

Commercial Alert, a 3-year-old consumer organization in Portland, Ore., founded by Ralph Nader, filed a formal complaint with the Federal Trade Commission last week, charging that eight of the major search engines were “inserting advertisements in search engine results without clear and conspicuous disclosure that the ads are ads.”

Many search engines have gone to great lengths to fuzz the line between editorial and commercial listings.

To which I say: Bravo! But also: It’s not enough. Better that the search engines clean up their act on their own by bowing to their users’ wishes rather than bend to government coercion. See below for how you can make your voice heard.

Why should this matter to journalists, researchers and other Net denizens? Because search engines have become indispensable to our online existence as we look for ways to sensibly navigate the Web’s 2 billion pages and 14 billion links. Seven of the 10 most visited Web sites are search engines. And a February survey by the Pew Internet & American Life Project found that Internet users’ top two activities are e-mail and online searches.

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Publishers and database vendors consider their next steps

This article appeared July 15, 2001, in the Newspaper Association of America’s Digital Edge publication. The original article is below. Here’s the edited version on the NAA site.

By J.D. Lasica

Database vendors have begun pursuing different paths in light of the U.S. Supreme Court’s Tasini v. New York Times ruling June 25, with some purging their databases of unlicensed freelance material at the behest of their newspaper partners and others taking a stance of watchful waiting.

Jonathan Tasini, meanwhile, said newspaper publishers are making a mistake if they rush ahead with plans to delete freelance articles. “I’m sincerely hopeful that reasonable publishers will sit down and negotiate with us,” he said. “From day one our position has been to put out an olive branch to the industry and say, ‘Let’s sit down and cooperate.’ There are two ways to look at this. One way is to wind up in an all-out war of litigation. The second way is to look at the notion of partnership as a reality.”

The court ruled that The New York Times, Newsday, Time Inc., Lexis Nexis and others violated the federal Copyright Act by publishing freelance materials in archival electronic databases without the writers’ permission. The ruling applies to all publishers that failed to obtain clearances from writers for digital rights. Most newspapers began adding such provisions to their standard freelance agreements in the mid-1990s.

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AlterNet leads a resurgence of progressive news sites

This column appeared July 12, 2001, in the Online Journalism Review. Here’s the version on the OJR site.

By J.D. Lasica

Will a handful of big corporations control virtually all the news published on the Internet? On some days it certainly appears that way, especially in light of the report last month that four companies control half of all the traffic on the Web.

The prospects for independent content sites seem grim today, what with Salon running low on cash and the zines Feed and Suck closing up shop.

But one voice of grassroots independent journalism has recently begun to thrive. More surprising still, its point of view offers a decidedly left-of-center tilt.

The secrets of AlterNet’s success? It’s not out to make money. And it’s riding a wave of public anger about the Bush administration’s less-than-compassionate policies on the environment, energy, civil rights and other issues that tend to send progressives into a frothy lather.

While the right has long ruled the Net by dominating message boards, polls and peer-to-peer sites like FreeRepublic (see my column last fall on conservative news sites), the political left has been comparatively silent. That may be changing.

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A look at the current state of online news’ credibility

July 2001

By J.D. Lasica

When the Web first blasted onto the public’s radar screen back in 1994, the grand pooh-bahs of journalism wondered what it meant for the profession: Would journalists become obsolete in the new Net order? Would the Internet’s anything-goes dynamic dilute journalism’s core values and standards? What were the rules, and who would write them?

Things have settled down a bit since the Web’s Kitty Hawk days. Now that the high-tech bubble has burst and we’re moving into a period of retrenchment and reassessment, it seems appropriate to pause and consider how the Internet is shaping journalism ethics, and how the Internet ethic is steering journalism in new directions.

Every day we read about ethical lapses fostered in cyberspace: the stealth drug company site masquerading as a health information center, misleading stock tips made in financial chat rooms, electronic shopping bots whose results are skewed to favor retail clients, e-commerce sites’ egregious violations of users’ privacy. Compared to this sorry track record, online news sites have performed admirably.

That’s not to say that journalism on the Web has been flawless. Both traditional news operations and newcomers like Slate and Salon have encountered their fair share of ethical controversies. It strikes me that online journalism ethics might be grouped into three broad categories:

•   Gathering the news. Journalists face a new host of ethical considerations related to the online medium, ranging from a reporter concealing her identity in a chat room to quoting from bulletin board postings to recording and streaming digital footage without the subject’s permission.

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Former LA Times newsman takes on role as reader representative at MSNBC

This column appeared July 1, 2001, in the Online Journalism Review. Here’s the version on the OJR site.

By J.D. Lasica

Online news has its first ombudsman. But to hear him tell it, the view from cyberspace doesn’t differ from terra firma as much as he’d expected.

“The thing that has surprised me most is that the kinds of concerns readers have on the Web track pretty closely with their concerns in traditional media,” says Dan Fisher, who began his job as ombudsman for MSNBC in mid-April.

The idea for an ombudsman originated with MSNBC editor-in-chief Merrill Brown, who wanted to send the message that MSNBC is a news organization concerned about serious journalism, Fisher says.

They couldn’t have made a more stellar choice than Fisher, who worked 27 years at the Los Angeles Times as a reporter, editor and bureau chief in Moscow, London, Warsaw and Jerusalem. He left the Times to become managing editor of Microsoft Sidewalk and then served five years as editor-in-chief of the MSN MoneyCentral Web site before retiring and joining the ranks of the self-employed.

So the man knows something about the Web, and journalism, and credibility.

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