A few suggestions before we begin the Dialog proper. We should keep in mind that our audience is already bombarded with lofty speculation on the medium and its message, particularly now that "company visionary" has become an acceptable job description. Surely no new medium in history has been as fixated with itself as the Web has been these first few years. A certain measure of navel-gazing is going to be unavoidable here, though in our case the self-reflection is probably warranted. (It happens to be a very interesting navel, after all.) But I do think we should agree at the outset that the Web is a rich enough platform to support many different types of journalism -- just as print and television do today. Let's ratchet this conversation down a few notches from the usual Toffler-style futurism; no bold proclamations about the ashheap of Second Wave journalism, please -- and no rants about someone "not getting it." One sign of a powerful cultural form is that it can be "gotten" in many different ways. The more pliable, the more multi-dimensional, the better.

So let's work instead on a more local level: not "what does the medium mean?" but "what are we doing with the medium now?" Let's talk about Web journalism in the present tense, not the future -- as a group of editors working in HTML on a daily basis. If we do find it necessary to talk on a more abstract plane, let's keep in mind that we're talking about trends here, and not intransigent qualities. Television, for instance, trends towards soundbite-style coverage, despite the existence of Frontline and Edward R. Murrow. It's worth discussing the Web's dispositions in this way, as long as we make it clear we're talking about tendencies here, and not some sort of rigid definition. Every medium pushes its practicioners in certain directions, and it's probably worthwhile to discuss what those directions are, even if we choose to resist them.

On that note, then, the first question: how useful is the magazine metaphor anyway? What have each of you drawn from the print magazine model? Do you consider page-bound journalism your closest relative, or is there another filiation that you find more productive? Are there dangers in sticking too close to the magazine model? For that matter, why look to existing media at all?

FEED Reader Kris Fieswick writes in to say:

"Print journalism has been through countless style "morphs" in the past century, from 'yellow' to 'illusion of impartiality' to 'literary non-fiction,' a format in which the personality of the writer dominates the presentation of facts. Television journalism made looks and sex-appeal the top job requirements for journalists. Where does the Web fall?..."

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I'm impressed by the way Slate has used the magazine metaphor to offer a very clean interface. And I like some of the stories -- I'm printing out the piece by Jodie Allen as something to have handy when I get in the next argument with some slob who hungers for a tax cut. Love those info-graphics.

Kudos to Slate for being rigorous with the idea. We've been much more confused at HotWired, alternating between horizontal navigational structures and straightforward "teaser" links on the front, while juggling URLs, renaming programs, creating database interfaces, and generally getting messy. We rejected the magazine metaphor from the beginning because we sensed that the most interesting things to happen here would NOT be magazines.

Today, we are further away from the magazine metaphor than ever. HotWired is becoming less a Web site than a network of web sites, and the individual sites (pop.com, dreamjobs.com, cocktailtime.com, hotbot.com, netizen.com, suck.com, etc.) sit at their own URLs and have their own identities. None of them are magazines. The front door of HotWired, at hotwired.com, is really a daily program of its own, with a short animation and a quick column of headlines from the other HotWired sites, with links.

Steven Johnson writes: "Web sites may eventually break with the print model in all sorts of ways: they may prove to be more interactive, less linear, less text-driven, etc. But I suspect that good Web sites will continue to borrow their sense of scale from their print predecessors..."

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Word doesn't contain much traditional journalism. There are a few big pieces that the average person would recognize as "journalism," but not many. What we do is generally closer to documentary. I'm less interested in news than I am in ordinary life. I love things like Working, Studs Terkel's book; Salesman, the Maysles brothers' film; and Frederick Wiseman's films. They document everyday life in a (seemingly) very straightforward way. They reflect, rather than analyze.

I once worked on a documentary about public access television, during the research of which I saw some incredible (and some horrible) TV made by non-professionals. I have also spent nearly 5 years on Echo, during which I've read some incredible (and some horrible) writing by non-professionals. And I love `zines. I'm hooked on amateur stuff. At its best, it's fascinating--passionate, intimate, unpredictable, and disarmingly lacking in artifice. People who are "inside" experiences of any kind tell about them in a very different way from people who "cover" them.

And of course, first-person, amateur writing is the bread-and-butter of the net, and will continue to be important, if websites develop more good bbs-type discussion areas.

So what I've done on Word is present a lot of first-person, documentary writing, much of it by non-professional writers. We work with them extensively, trying to avoid compromising either quality or authenticity.

The magazine model fits Word more than I wish it did, and probably more now than it will in the future. We plan to keep experimenting with the web's growing array of multimedia tools, making more objects and fewer text articles. Eventually, we'll probably have to change our name to Thing.

Stefanie Syman writes: "Presenting non-journalistic writing on a time table that closely resembles a publication, Word engages then defies readers' expectations of "magazines" and zines. This can make the experience of reading Word disorienting..."

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Stefanie Syman writes: "Word focuses on the first person view of things. But the collaboration between the speaker/writer and artist/producer completely transforms this story..."

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I am attached to the "magazine model" because magazines are the world I come from, not just as a producer but as a consumer. I love reading magazines, flipping through magazines, talking about magazines. The first question for me was not: here I am in this new medium, what (if anything) is the proper model from more traditional media? My first question was: I'm a magazine guy--how (if at all) should magazines be adapted for this new medium? As Steve notes, cyberspace is a big place, with plenty of room for all sorts of "models" and no one right way to do it. Everyone on this panel believes that something at least vaguely resembling a magazine is an appropriate model for publishing on the web.

So if traditional magazines are so swell, why come trampling into cyberspace? Now I'll repeat what has already earned me a reputation as a troglodyte: what excites me the most about publishing a magazine on the Web--still--is not the technological bells and whistles but the sheer economics: no paper, no printing, no postage (and no Postal Service delay). All my life I've worked for good magazines that lose money. If this new medium can make good magazine journalism both cheaper for the customer (therefore more widely accessible) and self-supporting (therefore not dependent on some rich person's generosity or whim), that surely is a very good thing, completely apart from the ways it may or may not change the nature of that journalism.

Slate, by the way, does have all the technological bells and whistles (hyperlinks, multimedia, interactivity, reader participation), and we enjoy trying to use them creatively. We're not against them. My only point is, don't overlook the sheer economics.

Steven Johnson writes: "I share your attachment to the print magazine format, Mike, but I wonder whether they're aren't cases where leaning too heavily on the print metaphors can detract from a Web site. I'm thinking here of the page numbers in Slate..."

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I'm going address the larger issue of "looking to existing media..." before I get into the nitty gritty of how FEED has adhered to (or not) the magazine metaphor. At the risk of stating the obvious: the Web so far has been best at text. This of course is changing quickly as bandwidth expands and browsers get more sophisticated. But if you want to transcend the browser barrier, text has the most reach. And, well, it would be silly if not impossible to ignore the thousands of years of history of text and essentially start over, simply because the delivery mechanism is the computer and the Internet. As the web gets better at serving up 3D, sound and video, people will be looking much more to film, video games, theater and other media for inspiration. But all of these metaphors or models can only describe part of the experience of the Web. They're points of departure which help us make sense of a new and unruly medium but will no doubt be superseded. It will be interesting to see what medium takes the web as its initial metaphor 50 years from now.

Now, of course, we could have looked towards other types of texts as our model: the book, the catalog, the encyclopedia. But the magazine does certain things very well and it encompasses a pretty large spectrum of possibilities. It's compact; good ones have a coherent editorial voice; you can address any number of types of subjects; it's dynamic; and within this textual space you'll find a number of different voices. In a medium which affords billboard type real estate to an infinite number of voices, the challenge is to create a focused site which reliably delivers information and has a distinct personality. So the magazine achieves this in print (or good ones do anyway). No reason to trash a good solution just because it's executed in paper and ink.

At FEED we've been very deliberate in adapting what we felt were the best elements of the magazine to the web. For instance, we tend to like writers who have published in magazines because they've mastered a certain kind of narrative. It means we have less work to do with them. Also, dividing the site up into sections -- ie. Features and Filter -- follows the format of most magazines. But, the magazine model ultimately falls short, and that's where things really get interesting. You can't run a FEED Dialog in a magazine. And of course, hypertext throws a whole new variable into navigation and continuity. In fact, we're still searching for ways to address really basic issues -- how do you let readers know where they are within your site -- that magazines have dealt with quite elegantly. Here, though, the answers look pretty clumsy in the context of the Web. So, FEED uses what has become a Web convention, a button bar which lets you go from any article or page to any other section. Slate, in contrast, has literalized the magazine metaphor and gives readers page numbers. Eventually, many aspects of FEED will probably diverge further from the magazine but it's been a useful place to begin, one which has helped ease the transition into completely foreign territory. Hopefully we'll soon find much more precise language for describing the experience of web sites like FEED and Word and Hotwired and Slate -- and better methods to structure this experience for our readers. Look at FEED in a year, and it will probably be harder to find the "traditional" magazine within the Web site.

FEED Reader Mike Sugarbaker writes in to say: "This comment, for me, hits a very important nail on the head. Magazines contain a certain kind of narrative. Is it the best kind? Depends on your opinion.... The thing about the Web that gives me hope is the possibility that people will begin to see more types of narrative as being 'respectable'..."

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Click here to read Part Two of the Dialog, as the panel discusses the issue of reader participation. You can also access an overview of the Dialog in progress. Click here to post your responses in our Feedbag discussion area.