Surfing
the World
Wide Web makes me feel like a demented child running amok in a candy store. The
reptile cortex seems to take over, as the ease of jumping from one link to
another fosters a heedless momentum that discourages stopping to savor
delectable chunks of information. Fortunately, there aren’t too
many of
them. Much of the Web, novices soon discover, is a vast blur of advertising and
non-prose, and the occasional 10,000-word essay on student rebellion in China
or whatever must be turned into hard copy which then turns into office clutter,
albeit nifty clutter. (The Usenet is a whole other box of chocolates.)
Still and all, the Web is here to stay, at least as a harbinger of the merger
of on-line and video services that will hit a few years hence. And since the
ostensible subject of this column is local news media, the Web attempts of
local news providers deserve a look. Two of Austin’s TV news operations, K-Eye
42 and KXAN 36, are hyping their Web pages on the air like there’s no tomorrow.
The former was first out of the gate months ago, the latter came along more
recently, and neither of the other two news operations in town have pages up
yet.
It’s hard to tell whether these sites have much reason for existing other than
advertising the news broadcast and maintaining a with-it image. They seem to
lack a profit center, though K-Eye has cleverly titled its advertising
component the “Interactive Marketplace.” It consists of links to commercial
sites, and it’s currently underpopulated, boasting a bare handful of business
names under the various categories. Of course, watching the corporate world try
to figure out a way to make hay from the Internet is half the fun of following
it nowadays. Its massive popularity suggests that there are bonanzas to be
reaped, yet advertising can often be circumvented and the net’s basic structure
works against conducting secure transactions.
A perfect example of this occurred in a slightly different medium down in
Orlando, Florida, where an experiment in interactive cable TV is being
conducted. Eighteen months in, the most popular feature of the Full Service
Network is not movies-on-demand but remote control ordering of postage stamps
that are delivered in the customer’s mailbox the next day. “That won’t exactly
offset the costs of the $5,000 set-top boxes and the tens of millions of
dollars of infrastructure that includes fiber-optic lines and a roomful of
high-speed Silicon Graphics digital video servers,” notes The Hollywood
Reporter.
At least Web sites are relatively cheap, so much so that even the tiny number
of ads on the K-Eye site (www.k-eyetv.com) could pay for the thing. Clicking
around the site, one finds information on the station’s personnel, learning
that co-anchor Shaun Robinson is from Detroit and recently acquired a Maltese
puppy named Snowflake. The “Homework Helper” lists dozens of links to
educational sites grouped by topic — History, English, and so on —
undoubtedly a useful feature for high school students. World and national news
can be found by following a link to Yahoo Reuters, the online version of that
venerable international wire service, full of stories that clock in at two or
three hundred words or longer. Interestingly, the page features a sizable
amount of material on how you can “HELP SAVE FREE TV!” by agitating against TV
airwave auctions; this section is refreshing because it pulses with the fear of
extinction.
So far, so good, if only the local news component didn’t fall flat on its
virtual face. Here is a typical item, in its entirety: “Police Search For
Murder Suspect: Austin homicide investigators believe Roberto Sanchez killed a
man on the corner of East 7th and Onion Street Friday. He’s considered armed
and dangerous. Call police if you have any information.” Right, whatever, as
Bob Dole might say. They could do better if they hired a college intern to type
in the transcripts of the news pieces that go out over the air, though this
kind of item does have the advantage of stripping away voyeuristic video of the
crime scene and grieving relatives.
KXAN’s site (www.kxan.com) suffers from the same paucity of local news, and
following the link to world and national news leads straight to… Yahoo
Reuters. But the best reason for looking at this site, as the TV commercials
scream day and night, is the availability of Live Doppler Radar. By remarkable
coincidence, it is actually raining when I check it out. Since the image is
updated every three minutes, I am able to see what the area map looks like
covered with electronic salsa verde splatter, and then, an hour or so later,
what it looks like covered with nothing at all. KXAN will spend tens of
thousands of dollars sending a reporter and crew to the Republican convention
in San Diego. If they were smart, they’d dispense with all that and just send
the Doppler Radar guy to send back pictures of the weather there.
n
The Austin American-Statesman has yet to put out a full-blown
online edition; the site I found only listed names and phone numbers of
editors, along with links to Web sites of elected representatives. However, the
last six years of the paper’s archives can be accessed at www.austin360.com, or
directly at www.tlc.statesman.com (type in “guest” for the name and “austin360”
for the password). This site’s usefulness for the general reader is marred by a
search engine that lacks power and versatility. For researchers, it can come in
handy as long as you keep your keyword search parameters narrow and brace
yourself for blocks of copy minus paragraph breaks. For example, a search for
stories relating to “golf” produced a blizzard of sports coverage — the engine
gives you the choice of 20 to 200 matches, going back from one week to six
years — while a search for stories containing the words “Freeport” and
“charity” yielded such gems as “More fun than you can shake a club at”
(1-28-93). When the electronic archivists get this one tuned up, it will be an
invaluable tool. The best place, still, to get Statesman archives is
through SmartLine at UT’s Perry-Castaneda Library (PCL). You can’t get it from
your home computer, meaning you have to get off your ass and travel down to
campus, but it’s fast, free, and you don’t need an i.d. card.
Though not comprehensive, a good listing of interesting locally-generated web
sites can be found in the feature on the hundred hottest web sites in the
August issue of Texas Monthly.
This article appears in August 16 • 1996 and August 16 • 1996 (Cover).