The war on the web

2003-03-25 13:41

New York - If the first Gulf War was the making of cable television, then the current conflict in Iraq could mark a similar watershed for the internet and help redefine how major news events are covered.

From the high-cost, high-tech websites of news giants like CNN and ABC to the unvarnished rants of individual "webloggers", the internet offers an unparalleled variety of war-related reportage, comment, photographs and live video feeds that are pulling in viewers at the speed of a broadband connection.

In Britain, the top internet service Freeserve reported that "war" had toppled "sex" and even "Britney" as the most popular search term, while "Iraq" was number one on the weekly Yahoo search list on Sunday - up from 42 a week before.

"In terms of coverage, this may well become known as the internet war, in the same way that World War II was a radio war and Vietnam was a television war," said Dean Wright, editor-in-chief of MSNBC.com, which saw traffic on its news website more than double on the first day of the invasion of Iraq.

The spike in the popularity of the internet as a primary news source has coincided with the recent development of broadband technology which allows providers to deliver images and text far more effectively than ever before.

"A chief selling point has been the use of live video on our sites which brings the war into the workplace in a way that was not possible before," Wright said.

On the Tuesday before war formally broke out, MSNBC.com served 2.5 million video screens. On Wednesday, that number had exploded to 6.1 million and was topping 10 million by Friday.

Crucial relationship

Seventy five percent of Americans now have access to the internet - up 50 percent from five years ago - while there are some 28.2 million broadband connections in US offices.

"That's where the real audience is - the at-work segment," said Joshua Fouts, editor of Online Journalism Review.

"What this war has shown is that the internet has entered into a crucial and symbiotic relationship with the print and broadcast media. Read the newspaper in the morning, surf the web during the day and watch television at night," Fouts said.

Recognition of that emerging synergy is reflected in the resources major news organisations from ABC to the New York Times are investing in their online products.

ABCNews.com is moving towards a 24-hour live internet news service and had already carried live coverage of the first anniversary of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, as well as US Secretary of State Colin Powell's presentation to the UN Security Council last month.

Most experts feel the internet remains a long way from replacing the broadcast media as the most popular immediate news source - at least in the evening when the "hands-free" passivity of television viewing fits more comfortably into people's lifestyles.

Historic watershed

However, Richard Wald, a former president of NBC news and currently a professor of journalism at Columbia University, believes the Iraq war will mark an historic watershed in the development of internet-focused systems for producing and disseminating news.

"And I think there's little doubt that they will rank among the standard distribution systems of the future as the broadband increases its grip on America and the rest of the world," Wald said.

As well as providing an interactive element absent from mainstream media, the internet also offers a seemingly limitless variety of information sources that extend way beyond the purview of newspapers or television.

Should you be unsure about the precise capabilities of a BLU-118 Thermobaric smart bomb, the website globalsecurity.org is there to help, while terraserver.com offers satellite images of Baghdad and other areas in Iraq.

On the real fringes are the "webloggers" - individuals who set up personal sites to publicise their personal vision of the world.

One weblog attracting a lot of attention is that of an unknown Iraqi writing daily observations from Baghdad under the pseudonym "Salam Pax" - or "Peace Peace" in Arabic and Latin.

The diary is by turns witty, eloquent and vivid. As well as gathering a wide readership, it has also sparked a furious online debate as to whether Salam Pax is who or where he says he is.

"Please stop sending e-mails asking if I were for real. Don't believe it? Then don't read it," he wrote at the weekend.

"I am not anybody's propaganda ploy. Well, except my own." - Sapa-AFP

- AFP