The Netly News

Many years ago, I wrote an  overwrought essay about the advent of the Net and what it would do to journalism. It was called, "The Birth of the Way-New Journalism..."

and it was written for the launch of HotWired, which was Wired Magazine's pioneering, er, portal.

Fortunately, I can't find the screed online anymore, but it's main effect was on me: I desperately wanted to start my own web site, at Time Inc., comprised entirely of original content. (In those days, at Pathfinder--Time Inc's own portal of magazines--most of what was published was what we referred to as "shovelware," i.e. stuff that was simply shoveled over, verbatim, from TI's magazines.) Walter Isaacson, who was then editor of new media at TI, blessed my goofy idea, and I started a site called, The Netly News.

I even got to hire Noah Robischon, who was then a student in a "cyberspace reporting" class I was teaching at Columbia's j-school, and Adam Moore, a designer.

We were a 3-man band. And it was good. In fact, it was about as much fun as I've ever been paid for. We covered bloody feuds on Usenet, did one of the first machinima movies, and got into wars with our nemesis, suck.com. We published Declan McCullagh's muckraking, and Rob the Limo Driver's pre-Slashdot, pre-Linux rants, and Walter Miller's stories about living with his abusive, flatulent grandfather. We did some things that, had anyone in Time Inc.'s executive suites been using the Web and actually seen, we would have certainly been fired for.

I think, at its peak, Netly had a few thousand readers a day. I imagine it lost millions of dollars, contributing in its own modest way to the so-called "Black Hole" of Pathfinder. It lasted three years.

 

But lately, I've been pining for it. So, while this isn't that, it kind of is. And I wish it was

 

--Josh Quittner

Comments

[Andrew]

I attended and really enjoyed your talk last week at the Columbia j-school. I just came across a site called www.newsatseven.com, and I was wondering if you've seen it and have any thoughts on what it might mean for the future of web-based journalism.

[Q]

Hi Andrew--It's definitely an interesting experiment. But I don't believe that "automatic" news gathering is very compelling yet. Humans still do a much better job of filtering out what's interesting. And don't get me started on voice synthesis...

[Steve Rhodes]

With Wired now back in control of their website, perhaps we can get them to restore all of the Hotwired archives.

But The Birth of the Way-New Journalism... (many years ago was 1995) does live on at archive.org
http://web.archive.org/web/19990503195745/http://www.hotwired.com/i-agent/95/29/waynew/waynew.html
(and if you click on the suck link at the bottom, it will even take you to a 1999 obit for Negroponte's back page Wired column - the "Big Media" Pathfinder link leads to a version of it from that era).

I was actually thinking about Netly News when I saw Lev Grossman's ( http://levgrossman.com ) byline on the Time cover story (which really could use some Netly/Suck style links - particularly the brief profiles - http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1570718,00.html needs a link to http://www.flickr.com/photos/alikhurshid/ ).

A search turned up this 1998 Salon Netly obit http://archive.salon.com/21st/log/1998/09/29log.html

I clicked on the Netly link expecting to get a 404 error, but it resolved to Time Digital which resolved here.

[Walter Isaacson]

Hi, Josh. Gee, I wish we had one of those way-back time machines they had on Rocky and Bullwinkle. I would love to return to the days when we were inventing Pathfinder, Roadrunner, and the Netly News. If we had pushed hard enough, we could have turned them into Google (or perhaps into Magellan and countless other hot sites that subsequently disappeared). At least we will always have print. Walter

[Steve Baldwin]

Hey Josh and all,

Overjoyed that Netly's back! There really aren't many well-preserved Netly artifacts on the Web. It's nice to see the Cow restored to her former glory.

Thanks for the link to the Pathfinder museum, BTW. I'd love to tell you that 100,000 people have already followed that link, but I'd be lying. :)

best,
steve baldwin

[Adam Moore]

Playboy.com parties with Noah dressed up in drag... LC the cow and the twelve sites of christmas.... sigh... where are those starry eyed kids now?

[Jonathan]

I went looking for the netly news mailing list archive (which also seems to have disappeared into the internet blackhole) and found the SPINNING COW!

How cool to see netlynews resolve to something somewhat recognizable.

GAW DANG, it's a good day on the internets today.