Starwave Takes the Web ... (Seriously)

Mulcahy and her team of well-schooled magazine writers have had to contend with a fundamental redefinition of the nature of the product. Writing for print and writing for the Web, it turns out, are two different things. "I won't say that the Web totally changes the nature of writing," she says. "But it will transform the nature of feature writing. For one thing, you have to think visually. It's not just that you need pictures with your story; it's also mechanical things. You can't put all the visual elements of the story in the first few paragraphs. And the Web doesn't allow you to write stories that go on forever. The fact is that people just don't want to read much online. So you have all of this apparent freedom, where you don't have to worry about column inches, but in the end you've still got to keep your copy short and to the point."

At this point, what happens with Mr. Showbiz may be the best test of Starwave's ability to create a brand. For Mulcahy, the challenge is worth it. "Look," she says, calling from her old trailer in Joseph, to which she still retires to work on her novel during her rare days off, "I can go back to New York and get a magazine job anytime. But nobody's going to offer me a chance to create a whole new magazine in a whole new medium. At Starwave I've got that chance."

Then she adds one final thought. "I do wish we had a hell of a lot more advertising."

Challenge Number Five

Can you maintain your editorial integrity -- when 'integrity' is still undefined?

It's a non-obvious question, and a nontrivial problem : how do you define integrity in a medium with no publishing tradition, no boundary between advertising and editorial, and an insatiable appetite for advertising revenues? It is precisely this question that worries ESPNET SportsZone's Mitch Gelman.

In a company filled with distinguished veterans, the soft-spoken Gelman, SportZone's editor, is among the most distinguished of all. The author of a critically acclaimed book about his life as a cub reporter, Crime Scene (Random House, 1992), he also shared a Pulitzer Prize in 1991 for his work at New York Newsday. Credentials like these usually mean a lifetime sinecure at a fat daily newspaper. But last summer, Gelman's paper died beneath him. Around the same time, he saw an article in Sports Illustrated about the new world of sports online.

"I realized that I was seeing the creation of a whole new industry, the next wave of journalism," says Gelman. "It reminded me of all those newspaper reporters coming home from World War II and going into this new medium called television. I wanted to be part of the adventure."

He signed on with the right explorers. SportsZone's numbers are staggering -- one of the most tantalizing hints of the Web's promise as a mass medium. Gelman's site contains 60,000 pages of material, 6,000 photos, 2,500 audio clips, and 1,000 video clips. This massive content draws huge numbers of visitors. SportsZone averages 7.5 million hits per day; it generated almost 12 million hits per day during the Summer Olympics. Its fans are almost exclusively male (95%), young (82% are under 35 years old), and affluent for their age, with an average household income of $55,000 per year.

All of which translates into serious advertising: sponsors pay up to $100,000 for a three-month advertising presence on the site. SportsZone is one of the leading generators of revenue on the Web and reportedly produces roughly 80% of Starwave's estimated $7 million in total revenues.

But as SportsZone attracts more readers and its readers attract more advertisers, tough questions inevitably emerge. Ask online editors how they think about their services and they invariably draw parallels between themselves and the newspaper business. Ask these same editors about the all-too-cozy links to advertisers that appear on their Web pages, and suddenly they redefine themselves as part of the entertainment industry and compare their offerings to television infomercials.

But what happens when editorial copy becomes just a hook to pull the user into the virtual mall? Is that really the same thing as ads in the newspaper or commercials on network television? Or does the Web, by its very nature, produce a different kind of experience that erases the demarcation between editorial and ads? Where are the standards governing such matters?

"I think about it all the time," Gelman says. "This is a business and we have to make a profit. But advertisers come to where the users are -- and though this business is slightly different from print journalism, the one thing we have in common is credibility. If we do anything that jeopardizes that, we will lose those users, and then we'll lose our advertisers."

Good ethics equals good business. It is a conclusion that other industries have taken years to reach. Many still haven't. Will the Web world one day come to the same conclusion? "The rules of the game?" Gelman quips. "We have to figure them out first."