A decade later, online toast to indispensability

CHICAGO — Your humble correspondent recently put on his best pullover sweater and chino slacks and, clutching his printed invitation, joined a group of colleagues at the Arts Club of Chicago. There we marked a major milepost in newspapering in Chicago and beyond.

It was the 10th anniversary of a force of nature now known as ChicagoTribune.com, the Web site for the newspaper.

I stood out in my tech-boom casual wardrobe among 10 banquet tables filled mostly with men and women decked out in formal power duds. They had come a long way from the days of Springsteen, Starbucks and sleepless nights of deadlines, Pepsi and pizza when it all began.

I left that gathering in good spirits, mightily impressed by what the coiffed and combed people at those tables accomplished during a tough decade for us ink-stained wretches.

The birthday revelers gathered during a particularly turbulent week in newspaper history. Because of falling stock prices, falling profits and falling circulation, the venerable Knight Ridder newspaper group had just been acquired by the much smaller McClatchy.

Wall Street hustlers with big stakes in Knight Ridder forced the chain's owners to sell because its stock slumped along with the rest of the newspaper sector, which just about any blogger will tell you is doomed by the Internet, the iPod and/or the will of God.

I was among many early adopters who predicted turbulence as the world realized every Tom, Dick and Huffington.com had just as good an outlet for dispensing information as did giant media companies.

The Web dissolved the "barriers to entry" that existed when one needed sub-basements filled with rumbling presses and fleets of delivery trucks to be a serious provider of information.

The first decade of ChicagoTribune.com showed that we prophets of digital democracy downplayed a couple of things. First and foremost: To become an information provider, one must acquire information worth providing.

The lifeblood of content for the blogosphere comes from the very news organizations that so many bloggers think they are making obsolete.

Newspaper mavens have become not only essential providers of the content for the Internet age, but they now offer magically competitive Web sites of their own.

Today the barriers to entry have returned as we realize the information that shapes the Web revolution comes not from brilliant bloggers but from institutions with deep pockets. In two words: Content costs.

One needs banks of ever-more sophisticated computers to serve up adequate information, and that requires programmers, artists, writers, investors, advertising sellers and a whole new branch of journalism. Consider an outline of how the interactive arm of this particular media giant represents a world of Web sites built around newspapers and newspapers built around Web sites.

Here's what the people gathered at those banquet tables do: They report on the war in Iraq and create an interactive guide of TV channels for your cable box. They serve up accurate listings of real estate for sale, provide job seekers with online résumés and tell the town where the hottest act will play.

They gather movie schedules and lists of weekend diversions. They offer online business information to evaluate firms and plot investments in ways far more advanced than what a Merrill Lynch or Morgan Stanley owned when the ChicagoTribune.com decade dawned.

They offer copies of every story printed in the paper since 1885 and provide hot links to police reports showing the latest crime in every Chicago neighborhood and suburb in six counties.

Significantly, in February 2005 they announced that the operation finally was "in the black financially for the entire interactive era [since 1992]."

And so it was that ChicagoTribune.com came of age then became the hope of the future for its parent firm. In the words of the long-dead William Wordsworth: The Child is the father of the Man.

James Coates is a technology columnist at the Chicago Tribune.