Net News, December 1995/January 1996

As readers of Newsweek can tell you, 1995 was the year of the Internet. Traditional media have rushed to praise the progress of the World Wide Web, over the past year, a Time cover story or two notwithstanding, and many of these same news sources are now preparing their own Web sites. Financial publications, with their computer-literate readership accustomed to real-time quotes and news feeds, are no exception.

To those familiar with the conventions of the Net, the arrival of traditional media is met with some trepidation; what works in a newspaper can work on the Web to a degree, but without additional content the Web's most salient features - instant feedback and links to outside sources - fall by the wayside. For this reason, much of what passes for interaction consists of using your mouse buttons to "turn" the "page" of the on-line document, which is interactive in roughly the same way that talking to the television is conversational.

The Financial Times Group has established two separate domains for their World Wide Web site, one in the United States and one in the United Kingdom. Both sites appear identical in form and content: a six-day archive of published stories sorted by geographical region, with summaries and top stories available separately. Each region features one story per day, with a daily technology story featured similarly. The site also includes a table of stock market indices, updated on a 30-minute delay.

From their multinational coverage to their special sections on U.K. budget negotiations, the Financial Times Group sites are faithful to their printed counterpart down to the salmon background of their text-intensive pages. One can even complete an on-site form and subscribe to the material edition. The sites also provide information on the group's FT Information division, which offers a range of data and computer-based applications. Screen shots of several products are available for those with graphical browsers.

The Wall Street Journal's Money and Investing Update site seems at first to have carried the paper's traditional gray eminence into cyberspace with it. Thankfully, once visitors move beyond the site's front page the palette broadens considerably. This is due in part to the advertisements throughout the site: though anathema on the Net until recently, they are handled well by using a small, unobtrusive graphic to link to the advertiser's home page.

The imagemap toolbar at the top of each page links to stories within the WSJ's daily edition - 30 days worth of stories are archived on-site. At the bottom of each page, a series of icons offers additional tools including briefing books, an internal search engine and a list of resources that focuses mainly on personal and family finance. Subscription is free during an unspecified "trial" period, so thrifty surfers are advised to check this site out quickly.

While the daily papers establish their presence on the electronic frontier, CNN has been busy readying the on-line version of their new CNNfn financial network. They have mustered an impressive supporting cast: Knight-Ridder Financial news is available through the site, as are stories from the Lexis-Nexis database. CNNfn's own stories are updated frequently, with a library of related links for each.

Some of these links include company profiles provided by Hoover's Online. A fine site in its own right, Hoover's maintains the MasterList Plus database, which contains searchable information on over 9,300 companies and pulls no punches in its coverage of them. This variety of resources uses the Web's strength to CNNfn's best advantage, though taken as a whole the effect can be disorienting - especially if you're expecting Headline News.

Unusual, too, is the site's air of irreverence, which though commonplace for much of the Net seems self-conscious from an established media voice. This tendency is most apparent in the Grapevine section: touted as a gossip column of sorts, this page holds the dubious distinction of approximating with HTML alone the eye-crossing typography usually reserved for expensive Manhattan magazines. While on the whole enjoyable, visitors will be forgiven for greeting with skepticism the idea of Ted Turner's staff of financial reporters as free-wheeling bohemians.

Sean G. Thomas, Sean Thomas, Sean Garrett Thomas