Fierce Battles Fought Over Web Guides for Arts, Sports

As the comedian Jimmy Durante used to say, “Everybody wants to get into the act.”

The “act” in this case is the creation of local entertainment and recreation guides that have long been the exclusive domain of the print media--daily newspapers, city magazines and alternative weeklies. Because such listings are easily generated and maintained by computer, high-tech companies are moving en masse to create their own online guides.

Microsoft Corp. (Sidewalk), America Online (Digital City), Pacific Bell (@hand), USWest Media Group (DiveIn), the Internet search engines Yahoo! and Lycos (cityguide) and Pasadena-based CitySearch are among the major players in the rush to provide information over the Internet on movies, plays, concerts, sports events and a wide variety of other local activities, information and services--including traffic conditions--in cities from Seattle to Miami.

There are more than a dozen online guides in New York alone--and half a dozen in Los Angeles.

Frank Schott, general manager of Sidewalk, says many people surveyed by Microsoft complained about having too little time to plan their leisure time activities.

“‘When I get home, I’m exhausted,” they said. “Give me one-stop shopping.”

Thus, on some local online guides, users can choose a film, find out when and where it’s playing, read professional reviews as well as comments from typical moviegoers, and get a list of nearby restaurants that meet their criteria on price, type of cuisine and other factors. At some point, in some cities, people may be able to make restaurant reservations and buy movie tickets online. For a play or a concert or sports event, they will be able to call up a seating chart, electronically insert themselves in the arena or auditorium to check the view of the stage or field, then decide where they would like to sit and buy a ticket. (Many of these services are already available in certain cities.)

Users can also submit personalized profiles that enable some online guides to e-mail them before tickets are available in their area for performers or events that interest them.

In their emphasis on entertainment listings, these online guides represent a special threat to alternative weekly newspapers, for which such listings have long been a staple. But executives at big-city dailies realize online guides could also be formidable competition for the listings in their leisure, arts and entertainment sections. To protect their franchise, many are partnering with America Online, Microsoft or other online experts (much as the Village Voice and Seattle Weekly are working with Microsoft).

The Daily News in the San Fernando Valley is involved in a joint venture with AOL’s Digital City. The Tribune Co., publisher of the Chicago Tribune, owns a 20% interest in Digital City; the controlling 80% is owned by AOL, although Tribune Co. retains a 100% ownership of Digital City in Chicago and the three other cities where it has daily newspapers.

But Bob Cauthorn, director of new technology at the Arizona Daily Star, believes that papers are making a big mistake entering into partnerships with AOL and Microsoft, both of whom he regards as “enemies” of the newspaper business.

“They mean to destroy us,” he says.

That is why some papers are incorporating their own local guides in their Web sites--and why the New York Times is developing a local guide that will be separate from but linked to its primary Web site.

Knight Ridder newspapers are creating “JustGo” online guides to compete with Microsoft in every city where the publishing company has a newspaper. The first “JustGo” guide is in the San Francisco Bay Area. Philadelphia, Miami and St. Paul, Minn. are scheduled next.

Another newspaper chain, Cox--which publishes the Atlanta Journal and Constitution--has launched online guides in Atlanta and Austin, Texas, and expects to be operating in 10 other areas--including Orange County, San Diego and San Francisco--by the end of summer.

(Magazines are also joining the electronic guidebook business. Pathfinder, the Web site for all Time Inc. magazines, now offers the Zagat dining guides to more than 30 cities online.)

CitySearch says its strategy is to form partnerships with traditional media wherever possible and to avoid competing with them by excluding from their sites such features as news, sports, weather and classified ads. So far, CitySearch has joined forces with the Washington Post, Toronto Star, television stations in five cities and entertainment magazines in two others.

These alliances are typical of how business is often done in cyberspace, where mergers are as common as molecules.

Yahoo!, an online search engine that helps users navigate the Internet, has joint ventures with--among others--MTV, TV Guide, Sports Illustrated and Netscape, the leading Web browser. Fifteen newspapers (including the Los Angeles Times) joined with VISA, the Fodor travel guides and an Internet advertising management firm to create a temporary “super site” this spring for the Triple Crown of horse racing.

Partners or Competitors?

Many other newspapers are allied with such Internet companies as the Pointcast Network, and more than 100 newspapers are affiliated with New Century Network (of which Times Mirror, parent company of the Los Angeles Times, was a co-founder). New Century is scheduled to open its NewsWorks site June 30 to coordinate access to (and searches of) its newspaper affiliates, including the Los Angeles and New York Times, Washington Post and most other major papers. It will be the largest online network of newspaper Web sites.

The battle for supremacy in the crowded field of online guides has already generated several conflicts. The Los Angeles Times rejected an advertising campaign for a Pacific Bell Web site because material on the site would have competed with material on The Times’ site. Similarly, the San Jose Mercury News, which launched its electronic newspaper on AOL in 1993, left AOL and went on the Internet on its own last year in part because it considered AOL’s Digital City guide to San Jose a competitor to the information it wanted to put up itself.

Battle of the Giants

The biggest battle so far is between Microsoft and Ticketmaster, the Los Angeles-based company that dominates the sales of tickets to live entertainment and sports events. Their fight figures to be the first of many over links and proprietary rights on the Internet.

Ticketmaster, which launched its own online site in November, is now selling about 1% of its tickets on the Web. In April, Fred Rosen, chief executive officer of Ticketmaster, demanded that links from Microsoft’s Sidewalk site to events on Ticketmaster’s site be cut off.

With those links, visitors to a Sidewalk site could click on a specific event they wanted to attend, go to the Ticketmaster site and buy a ticket. Microsoft and Ticketmaster had been in negotiations over compensation for Ticketmaster, apart from the ticket sales fee, but when negotiations between the two companies collapsed, Microsoft put the Ticketmaster links in Sidewalk anyway.

“Free navigation and linking back and forth” are intrinsic to all Web sites, Sidewalk’s Schott says. “It’s outrageous that they’re trying to change the basic rules of the Web.”

But Rosen says many other sites have links to Ticketmaster and he hasn’t objected to them. What Microsoft did, for the most part, was not link directly to Ticketmaster’s home page, as other sites do, but first to a Ticketmaster page created by Microsoft and then to specific events within the Ticketmaster site.

Schott says Microsoft did this to enable Sidewalk users to access specific Ticketmaster ticket-buying sites as quickly as possible rather than having to click through several screens of Ticketmaster promotion and advertising before getting to the event they wanted. He says he can’t understand why Rosen is upset because Microsoft is sending him customers.

On the Microsoft/Ticketmaster page, however, users see several advertisements sold by Microsoft, as well as several credit card icons. Rosen says Microsoft is thus using his company to sell ads and undermining his company’s relationship with MasterCard, its preferred credit card.

Moreover, he says, Microsoft has no right to bypass Ticketmaster’s advertising and promotion. To do so, he says, diminishes the value of his ads and promotion and damages his company.

“It’s predatory,” he says. “a blatant case of electronic piracy by a supremely arrogant company.”

Rosen sued Microsoft for trademark infringement, and when Microsoft refused to remove its links to Ticketmaster, his technicians blocked the links themselves, confronting Sidewalk users with a page that read: “This is an unauthorized link and a dead end for Sidewalk.

Microsoft subsequently tried to get around these blocks, sometimes by linking to Ticketmaster through online search engines.

Enraged by Microsoft, Rosen has formed an alliance with CitySearch in exchange for a CitySearch commitment of “substantial” resources to promote Ticketmaster’s online service.

CitySearch now has online sites in six cities, including Pasadena, New York and San Francisco, with three more expected to be available soon. Sidewalk, which launched its Seattle site in April, added New York in May and plans to open in eight or 10 more cities by the end of the year. America Online’s Digital City operates in 14 cities (including Los Angeles), and Yahoo! is in 10 cities, also including Los Angeles.

Focusing on Entertainment

Access to the various online guide sites is free to all users. Like most other Web sites, all these city sites hope to attract enough advertising to pay their bills. (Schott says Sidewalk has already sold all the available “premium” advertising for its Seattle and New York sites, “meeting our first-year ad goals before launching in both cities.”)

At present, most online city sites focus primarily on entertainment and recreation information rather than news and other, more serious, journalistic endeavors. But a few--most notably CitySearch--also include community news and forums on local issues, guides to businesses and other regional material.

Along with such newspaper-affiliated sites as boston.com and those run by Cox Interactive Media, CitySearch and Sidewalk have the most original material and the largest local staffs and of the online guides. (Each has 20 to 25 full-time staffers plus a large roster of freelance contributors in New York, for example.)

Although CitySearch is in some some ways the most ambitious of the local online guides, it’s Sidewalk that competitors worry about most because it is the well-endowed offspring of Microsoft, the 800-pound gorilla of cyberspace.

Microsoft is spending more than $750 million a year on a whole range of new media projects, presumably on the theory that it can afford many expensive failures just so long as it doesn’t miss out on the one or two (or however many) ventures that prove truly revolutionary (and enormously profitable) in the next century.

With $9 billion in cash, first-quarter revenues up 85% and a dominant position on the computer desktop, Microsoft has created not only its own online city guides but its own browser (Internet Explorer), its own online network (Microsoft Network--MSN), online magazine (Slate), online encyclopedia (Encarta), online travel service (Expedia), online music store (Music Central) and online automobile sales service (CarPoint), among many other services. Microsoft has also partnered with NBC News to create an all-news cable channel and an online news service (MSNBC), and it has bought Interse Corp., the leading manufacturer of software used to measure Web usage.

Not content to simply forge strategic alliances with other companies--NBC, MCI, Dow Jones & Co., American Express, America Online, CompuServe, Prodigy--Microsoft is also trying to merge entire technologies.

In April, Microsoft said it would spend $425 million to acquire WebTV Networks, a Palo Alto company that provides Internet access through special television sets. Last week, Microsoft announced that it would spend $1 billion for an 11.5% stake in Comcast Corp., the nation’s fourth-largest cable TV company.

Data can be transferred much faster over broad-band cable lines than over telephone lines, and although relatively few people have cable modems now, Microsoft is both betting on and investing in that high-speed digital technology; the marriage of the computer and the television set could ultimately provide Microsoft with a ready-made platform in every home for all its online products and services.

MSNBC Seeks Dominance

Microsoft isn’t--or at least hasn’t been--a media company. It’s a technology company. But Peter Neupert, vice president for news and commentary at MSNBC, says flatly, “Our mission is to be the No. 1 news brand in the 21st century.”

MSNBC is not generally regarded as a serious challenger (yet) to CNN on television, but the new network is growing rapidly, and its online editorial staff of 100 often provides better, more original and more interactive coverage on its Web site than CNN does on its Web site (and better than the even newer ABCnews.com provides on its site).

MSNBC on the Internet is headquartered in Redmond, Wash., while its cable counterpart is 3,000 miles away in Secaucus, N.J., but the two have joint staff meetings three times a day by phone, and each has someone on the assignment desk in the other’s office. As a result, MSNBC is already one of the best practitioners of synergy in cyberspace.

Many newsmakers and commentators who appear on MSNBC TV shows also participate in concurrent online chats, and the staffs of the joint venture routinely provide complementary and simultaneous coverage of the same issue or story on TV and online.

MSNBC on the Internet has also done a number of joint, interactive projects with major news shows on the parent NBC network. When “Dateline” broadcast a story on dangerous roads, visitors to the MSNBC Web site could type in their ZIP codes and check on dangerous roads in their area. In the standoff between authorities and armed secessionists near Ft. Davis, Texas, last month, the reporter on the scene for “NBC Nightly News” was accompanied by producers for the Web site and MSNBC, and he filed stories for all three news organizations.

Because of the coordination among NBC, MSNBC on the Internet and MSNBC TV, “we can bring more news to people in more different ways faster than any other news organization,” boasts Merrill Brown, editor in chief of MSNBC on the Internet.

With MSNBC, Slate and Sidewalk, as well as its creation of Internet programming and its hiring of journalists from many top news organizations (including the Los Angeles Times), it’s clear that Microsoft is trying to become a major player in the media world. As Michael Kinsley, editor of Slate, likes to say: “It’s as if a large company that makes Tupperware woke up one morning and said, ‘We’ve got to have people to make the Jell-O to fill the Tupperware.’ ”

But unlike Apple, Microsoft has generally been a developer and popularizer rather than a true creator; the company was initially slow to recognize the potential of the Internet, and even now, there is no guarantee that it will gain hegemony in cyberspace the way it has in the software industry.

In fact, early this year, Microsoft closed half the Web sites it created last year, fired several hundred part-time employees and announced the termination of 10 programs on its Microsoft Network. In April, Microsoft’s entire e-mail service was shut down without warning, leaving the 2.5 million subscribers to the Microsoft Network without electronic communication for three days so the company could rush through an expansion of the network in response to complaints about delays amid the rapidly growing e-mail traffic.

MSN has had other problems with its e-mail software and its billing procedures, and this month, Microsoft executives were reported to be discussing abandoning the Internet access business altogether.

Many people in the online world, delighted by such misadventures, would not be terribly dismayed if Microsoft did stumble. They resent its size, wealth, arrogance and power and the way in which its products virtually take over both the individual computer and cyberspace itself.

David Shaw’s e-mail address is [email protected]

Jacci Cenacveira and Rebecca Andrade of The Times editorial library assisted with the research for this series.

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Web Sites

These are the names and Internet addresses for the primary Web sites mentioned in today’s stories:

America Online

https://www.aol.com

*

Arizona Daily Star

https://www.azstarnet.com

*

Chicago Tribune

https://www.chicago.tribune.com

*

CitySearch

https://www.citysearch.com

*

CNN

https://www.cnn.com

*

CompuServe

https://www.compuserve.com

*

Cox Interactive Media

https://www.cimedia.com

*

Electronic Minds

https://www.minds.com

*

Feed magazine

https://www.feedmag.com

*

HotWired

https://www.hotwired.com

*

Intellectual Capital

https://www.intellectualcapital.com

*

Just Go--S.F. Bay Area

https://www.justgo.com

*

Knight Ridder

https://www.knightridder.com

*

Lycos

https://www.lycos.com

*

Marimba

https://www.marimba.com

*

Microsoft Corp.

https://www.microsoft.com

*

Microsoft’s Sidewalk

https://www.sidewalk.com

*

MSNBC

https://www.msnbc.com

*

New York Times on the Web

https://www.nytimes.com

*

Pacific Bell’s @hand

https://www.athand.com

*

Pathfinder (Time Inc.)

https://www.pathfinder.com

*

The Pointcast Network

https://www.pointcast.com

*

Prodigy

https://www.prodigy.com

*

Salon magazine

https://www.salon1999.com

*

San Jose Mercury News

https://www.mercurycenter.com

*

The Site

https://www.thesite.com

*

Slate

https://www.slate.com

*

Ticketmaster

https://www.ticketmaster.com

*

US West Media Group’s Dive In

https://www.divein.com

*

Washington Post

https://www.washingtonpost.com

*

word magazine

https://www.word.com

*

Yahoo!

https://www.yahoo.com

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About This Series

Sunday: A Times reporter--an admitted “technological idiot”--gropes his way through cyberspace, trying to come to terms with the Internet and its potential to revolutionize virtually everything we do.

Monday: Will the Internet ultimately replace newspapers and other traditional media--or will it give them an opportunity to reclaim the dominance they once enjoyed?

Tuesday: Different strokes for different newspaper folks--a look at the strikingly divergent paths that various newspapers are taking in transferring their journalism to the World Wide Web.

Today: Online magazines, online city guides and Microsoft’s drive for hegemony in cyberspace. But does WWW stand for “World Wide Web” or “World Wide Wait”?

Thursday: Can anyone make any money on the Internet? Will readers (and writers) like the computer screen as much as the printed page?

The entire series will be available Thursday on The Times Web site at http://ukobiw.net/media