🚀 go-pugleaf

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eye WEEKLY                                             December 7 1995
Toronto's arts newspaper                      .....free every Thursday
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MEDIA HIT PARADE                                      MEDIA HIT PARADE

                  IF IT'S ON THE NET, IT MUST BE NEWS

                                  by
                              GREG BOYD

Repeat after me the editor's mantra: "Dog bites man" isn't news. "Man 
bites dog" is news. And "Dog bites man on the Internet" is a weekly 
12-page section.

In the past year the combination of computers and telecommunications 
protocols known as the Internet has supplanted even liver tots and 
Canadian-born fashion models as the editor's choice. But when Rogers 
Communications and Bell Canada announced last week the roll-out of 
their long-awaited net services, the mainstream media's coverage 
showed a few gaping holes.

On Tuesday, Nov. 28, both The Toronto Star and The Globe and Mail 
played up that day's launch of Rogers Wave, a service that offers home 
users Internet access at speeds more than 20 times faster than 
previously available. The normally scoop-hungry Toronto Sun didn't 
catch the Wave until the next day, with a sidebar piece in its weekly 
"Connect" section that used the usual hoary lines about info highways 
and road warriors.

I confess to a glimmer of hope upon seeing that, in this age of media 
ownership concentration, Rogers' purchase of Maclean-Hunter has had no 
impact on its coverage in The Sun. Perhaps as communications 
corporations like Rogers scramble to grab employees for "new media" 
arms, the talent pool of editors and reporters who, in the audio-
visual-club cant of veteran netters, "get it," is dwindling.

The timing of the Rogers roll-out, and the fact that the service is 
available only in Newmarket for now, suggested that Rogers felt 
pressed to make a public display of its net wares before the arrival, 
that same week, of Bell Canada's rival service.

Bell Canada is considerably more media-savvy, as befits the grand old 
lady of strictly regulated and highly profitable monopolies. On Nov. 
23 the net hit the front page of The Star with Bell's assertion that 
Internet users are jamming phone lines, meaning 911 calls might not 
get through. The timing of the story, titled " 'Net surfers jam phone 
lines: Bell," was impeccable -- just when Bell was in the process of a 
hasty climb-down from a move to jack up rates for private Internet 
access sellers, and about to get into the business itself, it 
titillated the public with the prospect of little old ladies unable to 
report an assault in progress.

The seed being planted was the notion that only Ma Bell can be trusted 
with telecommunications networks. Thus the warm and cuddly name of 
Bell's new Internet access service, Sympatico (which, says a Bell 
subsidiary's solicitation for advertising spots on Bell's gateway, is 
designed for people who "need a bit of hand-holding to get started.")

This cuddly new image is also the theme of a current television ad 
campaign, which features Bell's president (10 bucks says you can't 
remember his name) wandering along a rail line. The ad is rich in 
subtext: the area where the ad is filmed, the foothills of Alberta, is 
not served by Bell Canada. And the image of the railway, a comfortably 
traditional metaphor for that dang information superhighway, is as 
much a product of the industrial age as Bell's failure to prepare for 
increasing Internet use.

Bell has been in the Internet business since the first bits of data 
were moved down a Canadian phone line. But despite years of keynote 
speeches from Nicholas Negroponte and other information-age 
evangelists, Bell still got caught renting out its precious network at 
a fixed price while the value of the information zipping across it 
went skyward.

                        GATES AT THE BARBARIAN

The monopolistic dreams of all the phone companies in the world pale 
in comparison to Bill Gates. Gates knows all about monopolies, having 
become the richest man in the world by persuading the befuddled 
personal computer division of IBM that its wisest move would be to let 
him take over management of the standard IBM PC operating system, DOS.

Aside from being staggeringly rich, Gates is now the official voice of 
authority on all matters computational. He even came to the aid of 
French President Jacques Chirac, who fretted at the past week's 
gathering of francophone nations that the preponderance of English on 
the Internet threatens the French language.

Chirac's complaint that 90 per cent of the net's traffic is in English 
ignored that fact that the net originated with scientists -- the 
lingua franca of science is English, and has been so since the 
Manhattan Project. Fortunately, Gates rescued the technophobic French 
pol, telling Reuters that the growing net would support all languages.

Every business publication on the newsstand agrees there's money to be 
made on this Internet thing. Mind you, the money is being made by 
stock jobbers with a piece of the action in hot stock offerings for 
the likes of Netscape in the U.S. and iSTAR in Canada. Just as 
investors want the net, and damn the price, editors are beating the 
bushes for net stories -- The Star and Sun are so desperate that their 
net columnists are both on eye's masthead.

Aside from business news, entertainment sections have taken the 
biggest hit from net frenzy. If Jodie Foster gets a threatening 
letter, it might be worth three inches of wire copy on a slow day. But 
when she gets threatened online, it's 10 inches of quivering outrage 
in The Star, picture included. But The Star stretches the net to its 
thinnest every Monday with pop critic Peter Howell's "CyberPop" column 
-- which confirms the suspicion that, while two drunks arguing in a 
bar isn't news unless at least one of them is a cabinet minister, two 
undergraduates arguing about David Bowie in an America Online forum is 
worth 10 column inches.

If it happens on the net, it's news.

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