INTERVIEW:
Question 1
Mr. Mossberg, you have become famous with your column on personal technology in the Wall
Street Journal. How has the role of journalists and their work changed with technology?
Answer
It’s been a very big change because we, of course, do all of our work now on a
computer and we have access to a tremendous number of information sources that were very
time-consuming in the past to get. Particularly with the Internet, you can look up
practically anything in a very short period of time. The other thing that’s very good
for journalists is electronic mail. It’s become a very good way to get to people who
are very busy. Sometimes it’s impossible to get somebody important on the telephone
for an interview, but it’s very possible to get them through e-mail, at least in the
United States now. So the technology has changed the work of journalists tremendously.
Question 2
How can you verify the source on the Internet? There is the problem of false identity.
Answer
It’s true. If you get into a digital conversation with somebody, particularly if
it’s not a well-known person and you don’t know if their e-mail address is
accurate or their name. At the Wall Street Journal we have rules that say you must pick up
the telephone and confirm the identity of the person before you print the thing. So we now
have a rule that says that if you are using an example from a person that you find on the
Internet, you have to telephone them and verify their identity, because it’s of
course possible and common that people take false identities on the Internet. So
you’re right. We have to be careful of that.
Question 3
What are your impressions of the problem of information overload, not only for
journalists, but also for businessmen and people in general?
Answer
I think that the way that you deal with information overload is you just have to be very
brutal and selective in what you read and what you see. And again, sometimes technology
can help you with that. You can set filters or what they call agents to just say: I only
want to see things on this topic or that company or person or issue. The risk of that is
that people will just get into these narrow paths where all they want to know is things
about the chemical industry or things about basketball or a certain company or a certain
cultural issue. I think you lose what you traditionally had with newspapers, which is that
you can glance through the paper and maybe learn something on a topic you wouldn’t
have anticipated and actually could change your life or it could have a good impact on
society or make you rich. You lose that accidental factor.
Question 4
You don’t fear real experience being replaced by a virtual life on the Net?
Answer
I have children and in our family they’re only allowed to be on the computer a
certain number of hours. They have to go outside the house and meet real people and do
real things. I think it’s like everything else in life. You need to achieve some
balance. If you don’t ever go in person to a football game and you just follow it on
the computer, that’s not good. People already don’t go to the football game and
just watch it on TV, so I think you do have to strike a balance. The difficulty with the
computer is it’s very bewitching. It’s very addictive. You can actually be in
contact with people without ever leaving the house. So there is a tendency, I think, to go
to extremes sometimes. You just have to run your life in a sensible way and, particularly
if you’re a parent, I think you have to throw the kids out of the house.
Question 5
What does liberating the digital content from the PC, the title of your speech at Milia,
mean?
Answer
Well, here at the Milia conference most of the people attending are not technology people.
They are people who create content, cultural content, entertainment, information,
education, news, whatever it is. Right now, if you’re creating digital content,
either on CD ROM or over the Internet, the only people in the world who can actually see
what you have done are people with the money and the technical skills to operate a PC. My
contention is that the PC will never be a mass market device. It will never get to the
kind of penetration that television has because it’s too expensive and it’s too
complicated and it breaks down all the time. So the way to liberate digital content from
the PC is for us to be able to use other devices, much cheaper, much simpler but which
could bring all the richness of this content. In our discussion here at Milia, we were
talking about the first of these devices, which I call information appliances. These are
boxes that go on your TV set and bring the Internet into the TV.
Question 6
Web TV?
Answer
One of them is called Web TV. It’s an American product and it’s on the market in
the States right now. Even though it’s an American-designed product, Sony and Philips
have licensed it and they are selling them in the States. But we also have a new European
product very similar that is just being unveiled here at Milia called Netbox. It’s a
French company. They’re about the same thing. It’s about US$300. It sits on top
of your TV, plugs into a telephone, and automatically connects you to the Internet. Right
from your TV screen you can do e-mail or surf the Web, and then just click the remote and
you’re watching RAI.
Question 7
So you don’t believe in the guidelines of Intel about the fat PC which will replace
the television.
Answer
Well, I don’t believe in any one thing being the winner in this. The mass market PC
is 20 years old this year. It’s been a fabulous invention. It’s got a long life
ahead of it. It’s been a lot to me and to a lot of my readers. I just don’t
think it’s a mass market device. Even in the US where it has really been more
successful than anywhere else, only about one third of the homes have a PC, and of those
only about half of them are on the Internet or are on-line. Unless the PC is redefined and
redesigned, there’s an upper limit to what it will do. I think one of the things
that’s going to happen from this new competition, from these Web TV devices and other
things, is that Intel and other companies are going to rethink the PC itself. I think,
hopefully, they will make it more reliable and simpler and somewhat less expensive. The
winner in all this - we can worry about what company wins, what company loses - but the
winner is the consumer. When you get this kind of competition and you get different
countries involved in the technology, in the end I think that the consumer wins, and this
wonderfully creative content we see on display here at Milia will become more available to
more people.
Question 8
But in the last State of the Union address, President Clinton said that every 12-year-old
child will have a PC at school. So the next generation will widely use the PC.
Answer
Well, I think what he said was that every child of 12 or older should be able to get onto
the Internet. And I believe that, in fact, achieving that goal in the US and in other
countries will be much easier with devices that are simpler than the PC. I’ll give
you an example. Apple Computer, which is having a lot of trouble in the PC market, has
just introduced a product in the US called E-Mate. It’s based on the technology that
they developed for the Newton, the hand-held device, but it has a keyboard. It’s
meant for schools. It’s about US$600 apiece and it connects to the Internet. Well, if
you’re a school in New York or somewhere, it costs you way too much money to give
every child a computer, even with President Clinton’s prediction. But if you can give
them a US$600 or US$500 device that also lets them get on the Internet, then you may be
able to achieve the goal more easily. So I think his vision of getting everyone wired to
the Internet will be achieved with or without today’s kind of PCs. There are other
things that we can use to get there.
Question 9
What kind of design, form and content must an on-line newspaper have, a digital newspaper,
to be successful?
Answer
It’s a great question about newspapers on-line, and it’s maybe too early to know
for sure. What I personally think right now is that the key to a newspaper on-line is to
give the reader everything that’s in the paper, because they feel cheated if they
don’t get everything that’s in the paper. But you have to give them more. You
have to update the paper constantly throughout the day and the night, and you have to let
them what I call "drill down" past the story to get a lot more content. There
are a number of good examples to this. One is our newspaper, the Wall Street Journal. We
have 35 editors who only work on the Web edition of our paper. If you are reading a story
there and you see a reference to a company, let’s say Intel, you can click on that
and you don’t go to the Intel website, you get a tremendous amount of journalistic
information about Intel, past stories about it, what their earnings have been lately, how
their stock is doing. There are a lot of other newspaper sites that are putting a lot of
that additional material in. If they report on a speech by somebody, you get the whole
speech if you’d like to see it. Most of the time, most newspapers can’t tape or
can’t print that. So to me that’s part of the key work. At the journal we charge
US$50 a year , a whole year for US$50, to get it.
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