Technology proves an artful dodger for this traveling junkie
"The message on where to meet my ride into town? Lost in the ether.
The message to call the kids at home? Ditto. The query from one of my editors? Ha."
Somewhere in the back of my mind a British army band is playing,
"A world turned upside down."
I was sitting in a hotel in Dallas finishing up the column that was
supposed to appear in this space when CNN announced that Time Warner was being acquired
by/merging with America Online. I think I have some idea how Cornwallis felt at Yorktown.
As those of you who read this space regularly know, I think newspapers are
here to stay. I've long said that my daughter's newspaper probably would not look like
mine, but she probably would be reading a paper.
Well, maybe not.
I am a technology junkie as well as a news junkie. I read news in print
and on-line; I have it delivered to my Palm Pilot. Alerts on subjects that matter to me
are delivered to my pager and/or cell phone. But I always come back to print. Print is
transportable, disposable and degrades gracefully. Technology is getting transportable,
but rarely disposable and -- like everything else in a world of ones and zeroes -- it
either works or it doesn't; no partway measures there.
The trip to Dallas was a case in point, another lesson from the technology
gods that I am not properly faithful.
The gods started toying with me as soon as I arrived at the ever-beautiful
Newark airport, seeking the e-ticket dispenser. The only e-machine in sight was, of
course, out of order, forcing me to stand in line with those hordes who still purchased
their tickets the old-fashioned way, through an agent. And yes, the system crashed when I
finally got to the head of the line.
The plane was too cramped to allow me to use my laptop -- even though it
had been specifically chosen as being small enough to open in cattle-car class -- but it
didn't matter since the program that culls newspaper web sites so I can read them off-line
provided me with stories I had read three days earlier in the dead-tree version.
Luckily, the airline had several Time Warner products that were in a form
factor suitable for reading in such cramped quarters.
On arrival in Dallas, annoyed that my four-hour flight had been as
unproductive as they come, I fired up my trusty cell phone. This cell phone, carried in a
hip holster appropriate for any geek gunslinger, is guaranteed by the gods of AT&T to
provide digital e-mail, voice mail and messaging in most of the continental United States.
Except, of course, any place I travel.
The message on where to meet my ride into town? Lost in the ether. The
message to call the kids at home? Ditto. The query from one of my editors? Ha.
The hotel phone system was a personal affront. As someone who has told
reporters in Rwanda how to use a satellite phone to send a story, and helped editors in
Italy communicate via CompuServe (an AOL subsidiary), no phone system in Dallas was going
to deter me. My e-mail and the Palm Pilot updates were just a quick call away. Oops. A
half-dozen $1 phone calls later, my CompuServe connection finally clicked. Unfortunately,
the servers I needed to connect to at the other end were down for maintenance.
No servers, no synchronization, no newspaper updates, no news, no good.
That was just the first five hours of my 36-hour trip.
This sort of behavior is not unusual for technology in this day and age,
and I remain skeptical of the people who manage it and their promises. Consequently, it
was a bit of a shock to turn on CNN (another Time Warner property) and see the AOL story.
I still think of AOL as one of those untrusty tech gods and Time Warner as a print empire;
neither depiction is accurate.
Granted, AOL has 20 million subscribers sending them $21.95 (sometimes a
lot less) a month, helping to provide a cash inflow of $483 million each and every month.
It generates that revenue with one-sixth the number of employees of Time Warner. AOL's
stock was trading at 207 times earnings when I started this column. It's now down to 193,
a range traders refer to as trading air.
Well, AOL traded that air to buy tangible assets -- Time, People,
Sports Illustrated and Money for starters. Add in HBO, RoadRunner and the other
odds and ends, and AOL now has stuff you can touch. That stuff gives them more avenues to
sell things, more places to get advertising revenue, as well as more content to fill that
beast they are creating.
Now, Time Warner was up in the air too, at 132 times earnings, a number my
professors would have thought incredible and untenable. Contrast that with newspapers --
New York Times Co. at 29 times, Knight Ridder at 19 times, Washington Post Co. at 25 times
-- and it's not hard to see why people want into that market. Yahoo, a pure Internet play,
was trading at more than 2000 times earnings.
The question now becomes, who's next? Is new media my new boss?
-- Steven E. Brier
From NEWSINC.,
Jan. 17, 2000, Copyright © 2000,
All Rights Reserved.
