CitySlurp

When movies entered the sound era in 1927, several unsettled years of awkwardness ensued. The results look bizarre today: actors clustered around a big plant in which the microphone was hidden, action froze for static dialogue shots, and fluid visual technique generally went into a tailspin. Dashing silent movie stars were exposed as the owners of squeaky voices.

Something similar is occurring right now, as print media struggles to adjust to -- how to avoid lamentable cliché here? -- the online revolution. In a few years, the online experience will comprise a new form of television, dominated by images, video, and audio. The ease of selecting entertainment and information options from enormous menus will probably open up new vistas of passive spectatorship, while interactivity will lead to extremely supple and refined versions of today's video games.

For now, however, the online experience is chockablock with text, and the most prolific everyday text providers -- newspapers and the media conglomerates who own them -- are engaged in frantic efforts to create a profit center on the Web. Hence the current struggle for dominance among the city sites, the electronic metropolitan guides that feel more like a sprawling, many-tentacled version of a tourist brochure than the newspaper listings and features from which many of them siphon content.

First out of the gate in Austin is Austin360 (http:// www.austin360.com), a product of Cox Interactive Media, owned by the same conglomerate that owns the Austin American-Statesman and housed in the same building as the daily. Following over a year in operation that saw a fairly complete staff turnover, Austin360 finally unveiled its official launch two weeks ago. ("Launch" is industry jargon for commencement of publication, though Austin360 actually had a site up and running in various stages of completion for many months.)

Also heading into the fray is CitySearch (http://www.citysearch.com/austin, though there isn't much there yet), now hiring editors and writers and technical staffers in Austin and Salt Lake City, having already launched a site in New York City. Taking its style cues from two popular New York city sites, Urban Desires and Metrobeat, CitySearch is capitalized by private investors, including AT&T and Goldman Sachs.

America Online has a city site venture called Digital Cities, and is reportedly trying to strike deals with content providers in many urban locales. Microsoft has announced a venture called CityScape. The first CityScape will launch in Seattle in the first quarter of 1997, followed by New York, San Francisco, and Boston. Many other cities are targeted, and not just in the United States, but the company isn't saying which ones. Plans call for 10-15 cities to be operational by the end of 1997. Those first cities will become battlegrounds between some of the major players in the online city guide business. CityScape's new editor-in-chief, Michael Goff, who most recently was president and founder of Out magazine, says the idea is to go "two inches wide but five miles deep," according to the Nando Times, an online news service. Meaning that Microsoft, too, will strike deals with weeklies or other extant news providers for content, and concentrate on entertainment, feel-good happenings about town, and detailed data on each city's cultural life. Listings, in a word -- which may not conform to any definition of "deep," but corporate types are allowed a lot of leeway with language when touting new ventures. It is not known if or when CityScape plans a move into Austin.

Over in Houston, the Hearst Corporation is doing quite well with its own city site, content largely courtesy of the Houston Chronicle (http://www.chron.com), also a Hearst enterprise.

Like, Who Cares?

There are various ways of viewing all of this frenzied activity. As a story of corporate combat, it may be less interesting than it looks. For major media faucets such as Cox, Hearst, and Knight-Ridder, the alarm they must feel at new competition for ad dollars is tempered by the fearsome edge they possess in terms of infrastructure. Already employing dozens of writers, editors, and photographers who do nothing all day but generate an unending stream of stuff, they have the content problem more or less licked. They also operate a useful service in the form of classified ads, easily translated to a digital format. Being brief, discrete, searchable chunks of information, classifieds make perfect sense online. Neither CityScape nor CitySearch are planning to make a run on the classified trade, a decision that affirms the advantage enjoyed by Cox et al.

Notwithstanding start-up costs of about $2 million, your friendly media giant can maintain an online city site for a pittance of running a newspaper, employing a couple of dozen people to funnel content over from the print side by translating features and listings into hypertext mark-up language, generating a little content of their own and selling ads, which are offered to the local business community for a tenth or less of print rates. Non-unionized staff and freelance writers employed by a daily newspaper generally do not have the power to demand more money for digital exploitation of their work. The friendly media giant can afford at least several years of operation without breaking even -- without even breaking a sweat.

Even Microsoft will have to run extremely lean, clever operations to match the majors' muscular content generation. And anecdotal evidence suggests that CitySearch is offering Austin freelancers very low wages for locally specific writing. The city site that does not forge an alliance with an established local print provider will perforce have to spend more money generating that content itself, though they should have no trouble filling web space with generic or wire service content keyed to national entertainment and sporting events currently on display in City X or City Y. They may well approximate the efforts of the majors, who will then shift a few resources into online advertising sales and wear down the competition that way. So it doesn't require much prescience to assert that three or four years from now, the clear winners in the war of the city sites will be the same monopoly dailies that already dominate the scene in most American cities.

Readers who are still awake are doubtless wondering whether The Austin Chronicle will be selling its listings content to CitySearch, and, more trenchantly, why anyone should care about yet another infestation of corporate media. The answer to the first question is easy -- no, but the weekly is talking to the search service Yahoo about inclusion in a site of nested links that will be called Yahoo Austin. The second question is something of a puzzler. Reading the inspired ravings of a guy who pounces on every episode of Beverly Hills 90210 like a hungry pit bull, gaping at the appendix scars of terminal narcissists, following the saga of Nazi gold in Switzerland, chatting about the prospect of ruining your life with a lonely systems engineer somewhere in England -- this is the essence of the Web experience, not finding out what gallery opening or movie you want to attend this weekend. A friend who has considerable experience in developing online city services laughs at the idea of sitting down at the computer with her significant other to map out their free time. "It's like some goddamn Jetsons episode!"

Readers who think some of this is kind of interesting are urged to check out Austin360 and the Houston sites, then draw their own comparison. The former resembles the XL weekly supplement writ large electronically, the latter resembles the Houston Chronicle writ the same way, and both feature the promiscuous unfurling of information characteristic of the online world in general. Think of them as city slurpees, and watch this space for a more detailed discussion of their content two or three columns from now. n The Chronicle website is at /