How Did We Live? (Commentary by Gwen Moritz)

Five years ago this week, Jeff Hankins finally talked me into taking this job. (Memo to self: Time to get a new photo.) No one else would have recruited an on-again, off-again journalist who hadn’t worked in a newsroom in five years. Yeah, it’s who you know.

When I arrived at Arkansas Business on the first Monday in August 1999, I was an old hand at using the Internet —? I had even created a rudimentary Web site for my previous employer —? but I had never used the Internet for news reporting. It hadn’t been part of the reporter’s bag of tricks in 1994, but five years later I found that some of the younger reporters didn’t know how to round up information without it.

The Internet is by no means a mature medium, but it has already revolutionized so many areas of life. It has revived personal correspondence; created worldwide markets; changed the nature of shopping (and, to a lesser degree, buying); permanently opened many public records; made news cheaper to deliver and receive; and created new opportunities for personal and professional relationships. Millions of middle-aged men wish they hadn’t blown off that typing course in high school. Those farfetched promises of an “information superhighway” seem conservative in hindsight.

There is a downside to the Internet, of course —? spam, sophisticated scams and hoaxes, uninvited pornography, even sexual predators. The publishing industry and academia are seeing previously unfathomable levels of plagiarism; the Internet has made it tantalizingly simple to plagiarize and, conversely, far easier to detect plagiarism.

The Internet has brought newsgathering to a whole new level. Ten years ago, I spent weeks collecting FDIC call reports for a dozen banks in order to do a comparative article on small-business lending. Today I could have all of that data in hand in an hour or two, depending on traffic at the office laser printer. (FDIC.gov is the best government Web site in history.)

A few months ago, I used this space to describe the ease with which I used the Internet to determine that it was Little Rock businessman Ted Skokos’ taxes that attorney Keith Moser was charged with evading. (That charge has been dropped but could be refiled.) Without the Internet, I wouldn’t have known where to start to track down something like that. Even if I had had a tipster —? which I didn’t —? it would have taken weeks to sift through the public records and prove the Skokos connection.

Every day we use the Internet to receive news releases (and anonymous “whisper” tips) and to scan news sources outside the state for items of interest at home. Are there any serious investors out there who wait for tomorrow morning’s newspaper to check today’s closing price?

The Internet creates news, too. Without it, Bud Harper wouldn’t have forwarded a tasteless poem about immigrants on welfare to his staff, and he’d presumably still be director of the Arkansas Department of Emergency Management.

The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette’s Cathy Frye has won numerous well-deserved awards for her series of articles, “Caught in the Web,” about a Faulkner County girl who met her murderer online. But the Internet can be a great place to meet quality people, as well. Little Rock lawyer Bill Allen and I first became acquainted through an online service called Counsel Connect almost a decade ago —? long before I had any idea of leaving Tennessee and returning home to Little Rock.

I met the Rev. Barbara Jones, president of the Great River Region of the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), through a Prodigy forum for working mothers more than 12 years ago —? when she was living in Topeka, Kan., and I was in Nashville.

Now we both live in North Little Rock —? not entirely a coincidence —? and we recently traveled to Virginia together for the funeral of another online friend’s daughter. Two other “imaginary” friends traveled many hours to attend the same funeral.

If I ever doubted the degree to which the Internet has overtaken my life, the question was settled in May when DSL service to the Arkansas Business Publishing Group offices was interrupted for most of two days. I discovered that I had turned into one of those journalists who didn’t know how to report without the Internet.

(Gwen Moritz is editor of Arkansas Business. E-mail her at [email protected].)