The Impact of 9-11 on the Internet

Berglund Authority Level 4

by Sarah Left
Editor, the Net News section of the Guardian Unlimited web site.

The Internet grew up fast after September 11. Overnight, the medium turned from a gangly adolescent obsession with pop stars and pornography, to a mature concern about current events. In the weeks following the destruction of the World Trade Center and the attack on the Pentagon, search engines such as Alta Vista reported that for the first time in the history of the Internet, the word "sex" did not appear in the top ten most popular search terms. Surfers had stopped, at least temporarily, looking for Britney and Hustler. They began searching for CNN, the BBC and Osama bin Laden, and they wanted events reported and analysed accurately.

One of the sites that benefited from this upsurge in news-hungry surfers was mine: Guardian Unlimited, the online presence of the UK national newspaper The Guardian. The attacks saw the readership of the paper grow 11%, but use of the web site shot up by a quite amazing 74% in September. The numbers astonished us: 44 million page impressions, 3.7 million unique users. The Guardian's paper circulation is 436,000.

One wonderful aspect of this increase in readership is that so much of it came from abroad, and particularly from the United States. We received numerous emails after the attacks, discussing our coverage of both the initial terrorist attacks and the subsequent military action in Afghanistan. Emails from the U.S .told us again and again how our viewpoint was appreciated.

Guardian Unlimited is not the only site to see its user base growing after September 11. The Internet allows readers to reach out for media and viewpoints previously unobtainable at a time when an insular world view can be particularly dangerous. There is no point, for example, in American leaders and the American media reassuring citizens of the strength of a worldwide anti-terror coalition when those citizens can read for themselves page after web page of dissent being expressed, in English, by foreign journalists.

Fairly typical of the email we received was this from a reader in Washington, DC: "I don't believe all that we are being told about the anthrax in the US, and I don't fully trust the motivation behind the national news here. I find your site, refreshing and well done...You have a new reader."

Obviously they are not all satisfied customers, but the majority of feedback has been positive. They are reading our comment and analysis not only because of the quality we believe it has, but also because it is removed from the immediacy of events in the U.S. American readers tell us they have found a lack of objectivity and intellectual rigour - perceived or real - in the mainstream U.S. media.

Readers searching for a wider world view have not come just to The Guardian, or to Britain. The web site of Arabic-language news organisation al-Jazeera was receiving about 700,000 page impressions before September 11. The site's page impressions reached 3 million afterwards.

The site, run from offices in Qatar, reports that most of its traffic has come from the US.

One of the attractions of Internet media for readers is the ability to get the story direct from the source, rather than relying on foreign correspondents who may filter the information to suit a particular national slant. Many readers in the UK are already familiar with Dawn, an English-language Pakistani paper, but no doubt many more will be scouring its editorial page before the end of this war. Lebanon's Daily Star paper will no doubt pick up readers for its comment and analysis pieces as the war lingers on as well.

What all these sites, ours included, should feel is that the Internet has turned a corner with potential readers. The trust factor, so often cited in the early days of the net as a reason online media would falter, has been established. Gone are the days when the words "I read it on the Internet" was an open invitation for people to disbelieve the information.

The Guardian has established a readership for the paper over 180 years, which is a good long time to build up a reputation of journalistic integrity. The online edition has had to build that reputation in less than a decade, often with a readership that has never seen the paper. The challenge is to convince readers of the reliability of information on our web pages when they have no sense of our political placement or history in Britain.

As the crisis drags on, people will continue to turn to the Internet because it provides a resource that thin-as-air broadcast and throw-away print cannot: an easily and immediately searchable archive. The Internet allows people to relive September 11 in video, audio, photo montage and endless digital ink, and to search back to the traumas of the U.S. embassy bombing in Kenya and Tanzania, or to articles about the first attack on the World Trade Center in 1993. Readers can reassess the Gulf Wars and read exactly what world leaders were saying about Osama bin Laden and the Taliban before the current crisis.

The Internet also offers interactive guides, which are indispensable for explaining complex situations such as a scattered, nationwide anthrax outbreak. Interactive guides can illustrate a military conflict with clickable maps, or let readers see what a cluster bomb does, or take an in-depth look at why the Spectre airship is so feared.

One of Guardian Unlimited's most popular features has been its talk boards, which offer us an enormous improvement online in reader relationships over the few letters we are able to print in the paper. Throughout the current crisis we have scheduled daily "live online" talks with experts and politicians so that readers can question them directly about their concerns. Readers can also discuss topics amongst themselves, using the site only as a way to find like-minded chat partners.

Ironically, at the very time that readership has increased dramatically and sites are handling more hits than ever before, the spectre of job cuts is haunting journalists who are working longer hours and turning out more copy to feed the insatiable need for news and comment on the crisis. The dot com sector had been hard hit before September 11, but many smaller news outfits will not make it through an even mildly lengthy loss of advertising revenue. That means that online media will lose some of the most creative and groundbreaking sites, or that they will be absorbed into larger media organisations.

More eyeballs than ever are trained on Internet news, and thus on the advertisements these sites carry, but the hard economic truth is that people are not travelling or buying in a way that lets advertisers spend their money.

UK newspapers lost an average of 10% - or £21 million - of their advertising revenue in September, according to figures from AC Nielsen. For some papers the news has been much worse: the Financial Times (FT) saw a 40% drop in ad revenues.

Most web sites do not make money, and at times like these cuts could centre on vulnerable, fledgling net operations. Two U.K. national newspapers have already begun to lay off staff from their web sites. Seventeen staff went from Telegraph.co.uk, the online presence of the right-of-centre Telegraph, and 150 staff are being cut from FT, an unspecified number from FT.com. The site already cut 40 jobs in April.

There is some potentially good news for online news, however, in that some advertisers are choosing online media over print and broadcast because the costs are much lower. A recent survey of 407 web sites by a UK online ad agency LemonAd, found that the number of online advertisements had increased by 6% in September. The growth rate is still too slow to bring unprofitable web sites into the black, and for news organisations with print or broadcast arms it will probably not make up the advertising shortfall.

Despite the tough times, I believe Guardian Unlimited could eventually employ more people and make more money than the paper. After all, the medium is still very young, and the number of readers turning to the site now proves that a market is out there for the site, quite separate from that of the paper.

Online media is hoping that readers who found us a reliable source in a time of crisis will stay with us long after the present trauma passes. And until the advertisers return in force.

Resources:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/ Guardian Unlimited
http://news.ft.com/home/uk/ FT.com
http://news.bbc.co.uk/ BBC
http://www.dawn.com/2001/10/29/welcome.htm Dawn
http://www.aljazeera.net/ Al Jazeera
http://www.dailystar.com.lb/ Lebanon's Daily Star

Sarah Left spent the first three years of her journalistic career with Silicon.com, an online media start-up, where she learned firsthand about the unique problems and benefits of news on the Internet. She now writes for Guardian Unlimited and edits the site's Net News section. A native Californian, she now lives in London.