Currently the Web is much too silent, too text based, too motionless and so visually poor. The reason is obvious, of course: money. It's cheaper and easier for publishers and mediahouses to simply move their core content to the Web. This means text articles from the newspapers, audio files from radio or television feeds from the broadcasters.

All this disregards the fact that the Internet is a medium of its own: active, interactive, visual. There should be content in the Web that is designed only for the Web: true Web content and true Web journalism.

Most of the journalistic material of the net is textual, regardless of the fact that the Web is not a text medium. Jakob Nielsen's usability tests (see http://www.useit.com/) show that only 16% of Web surfers read text, 79% just browse it. Reading from the Web is 25% slower than reading from the paper. Computer screens stress the eyes. Web surfers are also impatient and click away from the pages easily. The back-button is the most used button in browsers. And of course, surfing with a modem costs money.

Designing Web content needs task analysis (where people surf, why, when, how) and deeper thinking on the tools the Internet has to offer. So what is the Web like as a medium? What are its characteristics? Here are some features:

• Private: people usually surf the Web alone. TV is a more social medium.
• On-demand: not dependent on date or hour.
• Active: surfing, not watching. Web is "lean forward," TV is "lean back."
• Interactive: reader can control the content, feedback, games
• Electric: sounds, music, motion, computer programming
• Visual: almost limitless space for photos, photo stories and galleries, new opportunity for photojournalism
• Online: instant feedback, online news, quick updates
• Community: newsgroups, chat, e-mail, weblogs
• Storage: databases, archives, search engines

And perhaps the most important feature: individual EXPERIENCE, emotional and intellectual, that is created by keeping the tools mentioned above in mind and in use.

The experience could be explained by comparing going to the movies or watching television. The amount of concentration is much higher in the movies, it is a lot more intimate experience than watching the television. Experience--much similar to the one at the movies--can also be obtained with the Web (although there are no THX or Dolby surround systems, yet).

There are hundreds of millions of Web pages and hundreds of different news sites on the Web. Readers have to click to your Web site, but why do you think they will? Is your site different from the others or better, do people remember it? This is why it is important to leave a mark in the reader's brain that "this site was cool, I want to come back again." It is important to differ from the competition. It is allso important that readers remain on your pages and your stories without clicking immediately away.

What do people seek from the Internet? Facts and news of course, but I still think that entertainment, games, chats etc. are more important for most of in more visual, interactive and entertaining ways.

At Helsingen Sanomat (the biggest daily newspaper in Scandinavia) these kinds of thoughts led to dropping off the text based articles. IF the article were published in the paper it would have hundred times more readers than if it was published only in the Net. In adition there are 300 journalists at HS already writing about every subject possible. So our Web page was full of text (morning paper, online news). It certainly needed something different, "something alive," so we decided to concentrate in multimedia. We published one "Webortage" a month for almost four years.

In the end of 2001 our multimedia production was cut off for economic reasons. Perhaps the innovative journalism in the Web is possible only if the Internet proves to be profitable...perhaps...someday...

Tuomo Valiaho is a journalist at Helsingen Sanomat, Helsinki, Finland. He is the producer of two European Online Journalism Award winning webortages, including Case: Kautonen. These comments were prepared for the "Painting the News" conference and workshop co-sponsored by NewsLab and the Institute for New Media Studies at the University of Minnesota, February 15-16, 2002.