The judge pushes the envelope

The mail was authenticated by a secret code and a quotation from President John Adams: "Facts are stubborn things." Trees would be saved, journalists would be prevented from running riot in the clerk’s office, the mail would be sweeping across the Internet in seconds and Judge Zobel would look very, very hip.

Alas, the good judge’s plans were to be scuppered by a gang of men in overalls and hard hats, who were descending into the bowels in the earth through a manhole next to the courthouse even as the verdict was read. They were workers of the Boston electric company and, blundering about in the thick darkness, they accidentally killed power to the court’s ISP.

Klein’s epoch-making e-mail went out one hour late. For that hour, there was pandemonium in court, the poor clerk got mobbed by tense hacks and all over the world, thoroughly enraged old media went bananas trying to cover non-performing new media. In England, in Woodward’s home town of Elton, the TV cameras in the local showed regulars gaping at a huge projection TV screen, which showed a Web page being constantly reloaded and constantly failing to show the verdict. Judge Zobel will go down in history not as the first judge to embrace the Internet but as the first to goof up on it. With the advent of platforms like WebTV, old and new media are moving closer together. But until the Net becomes as accessible as earlier media, each will retain its core competency. The latter will specialise in broadcasting while the former focuses on the new concept of narrowcasting.

All India Radio, for instance, is the archetypical broadcaster. It has established newsgathering resources and entertainment libraries and the expertise and hardware to acquire and disseminate information quickly for one-time use in its region. Last year, it made its first foray into narrowcasting with a Web-based audio service. Now, a specific, narrow segment of people the world over — who are interested in India — can tune in.

But AIR will be a true narrowcaster only when, like CNN.com, it opens its databases to public access. New media is for consumers who want depth and perspective, something that neither broadcast media nor newspapers are geared to provide consistently. It is for people who, after seeing a newsbreak, also want to look up the archives. Narrowcasting is about targeting a small market — for whom time is not the priority — and offering them all the add-ons. Push artists like PointCast, the most successful model today, "push" initial content to the consumer instead of waiting for him to "pull" it down, and lets him make his choices from there on.

Judge Zobel’s stunt went haywire because he tried to plug new media directly into the old broadcasting machine. News organisations have established protocols for high-speed information handling. Had he simply called their representatives instead of "pushing" his content to them, the news would have gone all over the world in less than a minute. That it took an hour just to get to the TV stations is no reflection on the efficacy of new tech. It reflects, rather, on the poor judgment of the good judge.