This column appeared in the January-February 1998 issue of  The American Journalism Review.

Quietly, without much fanfare, online news sites have begun making good use of a revolutionary new information tool. It’s called video.

Until now, anyone seeking to capture the flavor and texture of a news event was limited to surfing the old-fashioned way: with a TV set and remote control. News sites on the Web have offered the occasional QuickTime video, but that required long download times, typically several minutes for just a 30-second clip — hardly worth the trouble.

But a fairly new technology called streaming video allows users to watch news clips instantly, at the click of a mouse, though the quality is a bit herky-jerky if you have anything less than an ISDN line.

The New York Times on the Web began offering streaming video during its coverage of Princess Diana’s death in August. Now it offers video with one or two stories roughly four days a week.

“We’re still in a learning curve,” says Bernard Gwertzman, the site’s editor, “but it’s evident there are people who think a news operation on the Internet should have components beyond the printed word — video, animation, multimedia. At this point, it’s a minority of people who like the bells and whistles, but we’ll go the extra length for them.”

For the most part, the Times offers video from APTV, a division of the Associated Press that employs video journalists around the world. But there have been other occasions when a Times reporter has used a digital camcorder to record a news event, such as the hackers convention last year in the Netherlands. “In a year or two we’ll be seeing newspaper reporters doing that routinely,” Gwertzman says, “just as they now put up sound bites on an audio clip.”

Jim Kennedy, director of multimedia services for the Associated Press, notes that 150 newspaper and broadcast Web sites have access to APTV streaming video through The Wire, though few of them are taking full advantage of it yet.

“The beauty of the Web is that it gives us the ability to cover a story through print, photos, graphics, sound and video,” Kennedy says. “Streaming video will become much more prevalent, especially as these online news sites move to the TV screen. It’s tough to read a story from across the room, but with products like Web TV, it works just fine if the story is mostly visual and audio.”

THAT IS ALSO THE VISION of CNN Interactive, which has gone online print publications one step better. Until now, a video clip on the Web has been a small adjunct to a mostly text-based story, with an image about the size of a matchbook. But any day now, the network will begin offering a streaming video service called CNN VideoSelect in which the video (150 percent the size of the typical video image) and audio are the main focus while the text and links are the supplements.

“We believe that, going forward, you have to be a player in video to be a player in news on the Web,” says Scott Woelfel, editor in chief of CNN Interactive.

“People always ask us how they can see something that relates to what they’re reading. This takes a big step in that direction. Video rounds out the story. Within a year or two, when people hear of a news event, they’re going to start thinking, ‘I want to watch that on the Web.’ ”

CNN VideoSelect lets users browse through dozens of options: individual stories with two-minute video reports; business news; weather news; archival footage of major stories; and raw background footage of unaired news reports, such as the complete tape of a news conference. Woelfel rightly observes: “Just because an editor decided not to air part of a press conference doesn’t mean it’s not newsworthy to somebody. It comes down to user choice, which is so important on the Web.”

The site also allows users to call up recently aired CNN shows such as “Larry King Live,” “Crossfire,” “Burden of Proof” and “Computer Connection,” providing users with complete footage of the shows they missed, bios of the guests, links to background information and bulletin boards, and complete transcripts of the show. Two or three times a day, CNN Interactive provides live video of a breaking news event.

“The network-based Web sites like ABC and MSNBC have an advantage over the big print publications because they’ve got the video,” Woelfel says. “They just have to figure out what to do with it.”

Says the Times’ Gwertzman: “Just as the cable and TV companies have gotten into the written word on their Web sites, we in the print business are now getting into their traditional turf.”

It’s going to be an extraordinary rivalry to watch.

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This column appeared in the December 1997 issue of The American Journalism Review. I was interviewed on the topic of Internet news sources’ trustworthiness by Bloomberg Radio on April 4, 1998.

If ethics are rarely debated during the daily miracle of churning out a newspaper, the subject is rarer still in the whiz-bang, techno-toy-driven realm of new media.

While all the old ethical rules surely still apply in new media, the Internet also presents dilemmas that never existed in a print world: reporters lurking invisibly in chat rooms; ad links embedded into editorial copy; the posting of private tragedies in news archives until the end of time; tracking users’ habits and sharing that data with advertisers; putting the tools of publishing into the hands of little league coaches and others who aren’t trained journalists.

But the ethical issue that may soon dwarf all others centers on what I call transaction journalism: the quid pro quo between a Web publication and outside interests such as advertisers or business allies. To the degree that it blurs the line between editorial and commercial interests, it poses a threat to the integrity of Web journalism.

We’re now starting to see the tentative outlines of such online alliances. The New York Times on the Web raised eyebrows in October when it incorporated links at the bottom of its book reviews, allowing users to buy books online. The clearly defined links transport users to the Barnes & Noble Web site.

My own view is that the Times’ arrangement is fine — this is an interactive medium, after all. But the Cybertimes would do well to add a disclosure statement spelling out the arrangement for those who wonder whether the newspaper’s book review coverage might be driven in part by its financial stake (however minuscule) in trumpeting a potential best-seller.

We’ll be seeing more of such arrangements as users come to expect to be able to act on the advice and information they receive on the Net. But not every publication shares The Times’ high journalistic standards, and we can expect the ethical Maginot line to be breached repeatedly in the coming years. Already, advertisers are banking on the absence of the traditional “chinese wall” between editorial and advertising in many online publications.

Fred Mann, general manager of Philadelphia Online, tells of one recent experience: “An advertiser asked us to create an interactive game based on the news of the day and put it at the top of our home page. To enter and win prizes, the user had to download some of their software. The revenue was attractive, but we decided we’d be selling our soul a little bit, so we told them they could run an ad, but we couldn’t dress up their promotion to look like content.”

As Mann points out, “There’s considerable pressure on online publishers to grow the business and start making money, so the temptation to fudge the line is great. But you can’t yield to that, because the most precious thing a newspaper has is its credibility.”

Even the appearance of a conflict of interest needs to be forcefully resisted. Mann relates the time a car dealer phoned the day the paper ran an effusive online review of a new BMW model. “BMW came to us and said, `Hey, that was a great review. We want to sponsor that page.’ We decided it would look like they bought and paid for that glowing review, so we turned them down.”

Dominique Noth, an Internet consultant and host of last fall’s Online News Summit in New York, raises a related issue: “What happens when TWA sponsors your online travel section but you know there are better deals than the price TWA is offering in its ads? Do you give up certain consumer reporting because it will offend the advertiser? What is your responsibility to your readers?”

Another issue arises from the growing tendency of online publications to forge business alliances. Reporters and editors now must worry about the effects of a critical story on a site partner, or a phone company that provides your site’s Internet access, or a bank that offers online banking services on your site, or a content provider whose physician database resides on your site.

In print, an advertiser might pull an ad or cancel an account. Online, they could withdraw sponsorship of an entire section. What happens when IBM sponsors your publication’s technology section, or Visa sponsors the consumer finance pages, or Nike sponsors your sports pages?

“Some of us remember the bad old days when a gas company sponsoring a radio broadcast would insist on revisions to a dramatic script that included a reference to the gas chamber,” Noth says. “This could easily happen again.”

Which is why, in the still-evolving conventions of this young medium, we would all do well to embrace the enduring standards and values of traditional journalism: editorial integrity, balance, accuracy, respect for others, and fairness.

The Net won’t improve on those.

This article was reprinted in the Swedish journal Pressens Tidning on Feb. 26, 1998.

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