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 Three founders of TheColumnists.com at the first anniversary dinner. From left, Founder Murry Frymer, Barbara Frymer, Darla Miller, Founder Ron Miller, Founder Gerald Nachman. Missing: John Stanley, the fourth "founding father." |
Who knows where sites
like ours are going?
of TheColumnists.com
Some three and a half years ago, when we first starting talking about the website that became TheColumnists.Com, the very idea of websites was fresh and unexplored.
With just a few media companies owning the opportunities for print journalism and fewer yet locking in the broadcast and cable world, we seemed to have come to the end of the line for great expectations. And the print and broadcast journalists had turned the field primarily into a marketing tool. They hunted out audiences that would buy their product and the products of the advertiser. That was, and now is, pretty much how the game is played.
But, oh, the possibilities of the Internet. Suddenly there was a chance for competition and you didn’t need vast fortunes to play. Or so we thought back then.
Ron Miller and I had built up a certain clientele with our print words. Surely all would fall in line on line.
There were so many websites with similar plans and some even had hefty cash behind themselves. But, really, no one was quite sure whether this new approach for public attention would work.
It is still too early to be sure of the outcome. There are thousands of websites, but the ones that sell products or sex or offer up some other unique opportunities are the ones flourishing. The writing kind, from Slate to Salon to a host of lesser known efforts, appear to be languishing and most are dead. Advertisers clearly proved to be unenthusiastic to website audiences. Nothing is happening now to indicate that will change soon.
TheColumnists.com has danced along, twisting and turning, trying new avenues to hold onto its readership. The original foursome of former newspaper columnists have largely drifted into the background, giving way to a variety of new writers, and personal features and even fiction has proved to be more enticing than the kind of columns we used to do in the papers.
And since a website doesn’t land on the front stoop at breakfast time, it has proved difficult to make it habit-forming. Instead, internet audiences have opted for web versions of what does land on the front stoop. Newspaper websites have grown in popularity. Alternative websites, like TheColumnists, have had more difficulty.
Clearly the Internet is in its infancy. Alexander Graham Bell, a half-dozen years after he invented the telephone, could not have imagined a world where countless people walk along or drive along talking on cellphones. And I can’t imagine where the vast Internet and the world of websites is going either. I have a hunch it is going to take more years than I can give it to find out.
Really, this is an amazing contraption. Our ability to communicate is almost too extensive. From e-mails to columns to research, everything pours forth all day long. I read half a dozen newspapers now from my bedroom screen, as I have time, including the occasional 3 a.m. editions that I might poke into when I can’t sleep.
Yet, newspapers appear to have little to fear. The ability to make money with news that now is not the latest news still rests with the broadsheets, where advertising fits so well.
When there is so much opinion and news and information available on the web, it is, unfortunately difficult to isolate audiences to your product. People roam and wander and click. A hot site one week is forgotten the next. But there is usually only one metro newspaper per area and you don’t forget about it from week to week.
The bottom line: Websites have changed the territory but the economics of the business of journalism has stayed where it was at. So far.
A few years of this is not nearly long enough to have built up a plot. The twists and turns are just developing. Three and a half years from now will undoubtedly tell a different story. I can’t wait to see how it all turns out.
©
2002 by Murry Frymer. The
Frymer caricature is © 2000 by Jim Hummel. The photo from
the first anniversary dinner was taken by Karen Sharpe.
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