Where the Sidewalk Ends
Before I
indentured myself to Microsoft and its stock options, I worked for a
publication called the Washington City Paper . The City Paper is
what journalists pretentiously call an "alternative weekly" and what everyone
else calls a "rag." It's a free paper, full of listings and reviews, that can
be picked up from bookstores and restaurants on Thursday evenings, and from
gutters and trash piles on Friday morning. When I started working at City
Paper , I assumed that the only reason anyone ever took a copy was its
listings, which were comprehensive and quirky. But after a few weeks I realized
that I had it wrong. The listings are secondary. Washingtonians read City
Paper because City Paper cares so intensely about
Washingtonians--their local art, their local politics, their local
controversies. Like any decent local paper, it views the city as the place of
man's highest achievement, of clashing ideas, power struggles, great ambitions.
City Paper 's staffers are obsessed with their city. Whenever there was a
movie with D.C. street scenes, our critic invariably devoted the bulk of his
review to nit-picking about the film's bogus geography. City Paper 's
readers are both fiercely loyal and fierce: Every week the letters column fills
with complaints from people who have been mortally offended. Almost every city
in America has a publication like this, a paper that is parochial in the best
possible way.
I thought about this recently as I was surfing through
online city guides, the Web's latest Next Big Thing. Internet tycoons have a
new model for urban journalism, and it's an ambitious one. Online city guides
are meant to be category killers, a challenge to daily newspapers, alternative
papers, city magazines, the Yellow Pages, and even ticket brokers. Online
listings and reviews are going be more comprehensive, searchable,
personalizable, and up-to-date than those in any print publication. Their
designers want you to plan your entire weekend from your computer--read movie
and food reviews, find the closest theater and show times, book reservations,
buy tickets, and even print a map to the restaurant. During the past two years
alone, CitySearch, a
well-capitalized firm based in Pasadena, Calif., has opened sites for 10 North
American cities, and more are on the way. Its chief rival, Microsoft, has
launched its city guide, Sidewalk, in Seattle, New York, Boston, and the Twin Cities, and
has plans to expand. Yahoo! and AOL's Digital City cover most major metro
areas. Daily and alternative newspapers are striking deals with the Internet
services. (New York Sidewalk, for example, buys listings from the Village
Voice , while CitySearch has made partnerships with the Washington
Post and Los Angeles Times .) The print outlets are also competing
with their own cyberpartners. So the industry is crowded. In New York alone,
Sidewalk, CitySearch, Total New York, New York Now, Yahoo!, the Village Voice,
Time
Out (registration required), Paper, and H/X
are battling for online supremacy.
(I
mentioned Sidewalk. Pause for full disclosure. I have embarrassingly large
conflicts of interest in this story. Microsoft publishes both Sidewalk and
Slate, and pays my salary. Sidewalk and Slate are headquartered in the same
part of the Microsoft campus in Redmond. I also have a good friend who works
for Sidewalk in New York. Oh, and I interviewed for the editor's job at
Washington Sidewalk.)
Give credit where it's due. The utility of the
online sites is high. The best of the guides--Sidewalk and CitySearch in New
York--are very useful. Their listings are extensive enough to sate even the
most jaded Manhattanite. Restaurants are catalogued by the thousands, and
reviewed, competently, by the hundreds. Essentially all movies, plays,
concerts, exhibits, readings, performances, and sports contests in the New York
area are listed. All events get the basics (time, cost, location), most are
accompanied by a brief description, and a hefty chunk are capsule-reviewed.
Maps and directions are plentiful. The search engines are a breeze. You want to
see Air Force One ? A few mouse clicks locate the closest theater, show
times, and a review. The most obscure events are found easily: Two minutes of
surfing turned up a gastronomical walking tour of Chinatown, a place to rent
boats for a lunch-hour sail, and a recitation of Beowulf , accompanied by
medieval harp. Sidewalk and CitySearch are customizable: You tell them your
preferences--German opera, Thai restaurants, action movies, Pablo Picasso--and
they'll send e-mail about events you'd like.
Sidewalk
and CitySearch aren't flawless, though. They shortchange the outer boroughs. I
queried both for kosher restaurants in Queens--a county with 238,000 Jews and
many Jewish restaurants--and turned up only a single eatery, a kosher
Chinese place. Both sites are mildly buggy. Sidewalk's maps tend to crash or
load without street names. The greatest annoyance: Neither site enables you to
buy tickets or make reservations online. But these technical glitches will be
solved. CitySearch is about to start selling Ticketmaster tickets on its sites.
(Sidewalk, on the other hand, is engaged in a nasty legal battle with
Ticketmaster, and probably won't be able to strike a similar deal.) The
personalization software will improve. And as computers get faster and smaller,
the online guides will be as convenient as magazines and newspapers.
And yet something is missing from this new city
journalism--namely, the city. The online sites are mass-market operations, and
they are infected with an inoffensive corporate blandness. They ignore
politics. The editorial content is limited to capsule reviews and short,
cheerleading columns about yuppiedom. The city sites are untouched by the grit
and idiosyncrasy that define urban living. (Sidewalk's movie reviews are pablum
provided by Cinemania, for God's sake. Couldn't Microsoft afford a local
reviewer?) The Sidewalks of New York, Boston, the Twin Cities, and Seattle even
look exactly the same, stamped out by a cookie cutter at Microsoft
headquarters. New York CitySearch and New York Sidewalk are based in Manhattan,
but they could have been prepared in Pasadena or Redmond for all that they feel
like the Big Apple.
The online guides, in search
of the largest, richest, entertainment-hungriest audience, have an image of the
city that is deeply depressing. Alternative and daily newspapers conceive of
the city as a place of controversy and passion. The online guides see it
strictly as a place of consumption. What is a city? The receptacle for your
disposable income. The only urban problem to which the online guides have the
answer is: "Where should we eat dinner?"
