It's not the heat, it's the humility

ORLANDO, Fla. -- The information age is suffering from information overload.

"There are too many brands and too much information out there on-line," said Tom Gardner, co-founder of the on-line investment service The Motley Fool, his obligatory trademark fool's cap jingling as he made his point. "I think we're all tired of reading about Monica Lewinsky. The new model for on-line success is in providing analysis, opinion and services."

Given time, individuals will be willing to pay for on-line services, Gardner said during his Friday morning presentation at the Newspaper Association of America's Connections '98 New Media Conference. "Local on-line communities should be driven by newspapers. Eventually, people will pay to become a part of that community."

Being successful -- and eventually, making money -- on-line is less a matter of content and more a matter of the services a site can provide. That theme was established early and repeated often during Connections' opening presentations. A crowd of around 600, already somewhat wilted by the oppressive heat and humidity of Orlando, filtered slowly into the auditorium at the Orange County Convention Center Friday. Randy Bennett, NAA's vice president for new media, greeted that crowd with a series of questions in his opening remarks.

"How many of you have websites that are making money?" Bennett asked. The audience responded with a smattering of applause.

"How many of you are just doing some wishful thinking?" This time, he got a few weak claps, and a groan or two.

"The days of evangelizing and hand-wringing are over," Bennett said. "The challenge now is to capitalize on the local markets, to bring home new ideas and a drive for services."

Peter Levitan, president of New Jersey Online, said that the goal of a newspaper web site should be to create an efficient environment, which requires a constant rethinking of the business models. "We're continually reinventing web sites as newspapers are shifting more toward on-line classified advertising."

Levithan said that portals -- web sites that serve as one-stop entryways to World Wide Web access -- are the hot topic of the moment. "Portals are so much of a buzzword these days that many of us are becoming bored with it, but everybody wants to be a portal, and newspapers aren't doing it yet."

By contrast, television, Internet service providers such as America Online, search engines such as Yahoo and Alta Vista and companies such as Disney are not only setting themselves up as portals, but also are now entering the classified advertising realm.

"We need to ask ourselves what business are we really in?" Levithan said. "What will make our site the opening screen in our community? Service is the key. People aren't going on-line for content, they're looking for specific services, whether that means looking for school lunch menus or Spice Girls tickets."

Newspapers are there with the content, but that's not enough. "We won't have a website that's as strong as our newspaper if we only put our paper on-line. We have to offer services. People go on-line for services -- for movie tickets, for yellow pages, auction services and classified ads."

-- David L. Swint