In Part 3 of this series (TCJ #267), Tom Spurgeon contemplated the expansion of serious comics-news reportage on his Comics Reporter website, spurred by what he saw as the inadequacy of comics news coverage on the Web. At the same time, he absolved his fellow Web-based comics reporters of blame on the grounds that they were merely hobbyists pursuing their reportage according to their own interests. Specifically mentioned was Comicon.com columnist Heidi MacDonald, about whom he said, "Heidi runs a Clive Owen article because she wants to run Clive Owen articles when you get right down to it."

This series in search of online journalism has not previously focused on MacDonald's The Beat (which updates daily at comicon.com) but her column has frequently come up in conversation with other online reporters. Although she identifies The Beat as a blog and a column rather than as a news site, it is among the regular rounds of pretty much every comics-news reporter.

When the Journal first approached MacDonald with questions for this series back in the fall of 2004, The Beat was only a couple of months old and was just making the switch from weekly to daily frequency. Though she graciously responded to the Journal's questions, she described a number of The Beat's goals as "in development." Now nearly a year old, The Beat has had time to better establish a sense of its own identity, and it should come as no surprise that that identity turns out to be, more than anything else, that of MacDonald herself.

MacDonald is one of the Net's more dedicated defenders. "Online journalism has been beating print for the last five years at least," she boasted to the Journal at one point. Another year has gone by since she made that remark -- in Web terms, an eternity -- so it seemed a good idea to check in with MacDonald and find out how much progress The Beat and the Net had made during that time. Spurgeon's offhand comment provided the perfect starting point: Is The Beat a hobby for MacDonald?

MacDonald: "I take umbrage at the hobby thing, because I write for a living, and I think I do it well enough to make a living at it. I think that comment is odd, but Tom and I usually disagree on things even while loving each other deeply. I have to admit, the Clive Owen thing kind of took off on its own and really surprised me -- it's probably the No. 1 thing people think about The Beat. When The Beat started I was reporting on a lot of things, breaking some stories, but all anyone ever remembered was Clive Owen. I talked to some other bloggers and they all said that it was the personal stuff in the blogs that got the biggest reaction. I played up my whole "crush" on Clive Owen for several reasons. 1) I genuinely thought it was funny and so did my readers. 2) I knew it would have a natural news cycle. Since he was going to be in Sin City, he would be talking about the movie and so on, so it tied in with the movie coverage and gave it some personality. But 3) there was a more basic reason for keeping Clive around and it ties right in to the basic agenda of The Beat. My not-so-secret agenda is to put comics on an equal footing with other media and show that people in comics shouldn't be apologetic and ashamed of what they do. On one level, believe it or not, Clive Owen is part of comics -- he's quoted on talk shows saying what a genius Frank Miller is, and he obviously has an opinion on being an actor in a project that is based so closely on a graphic novel. To me, that's a legitimate story -- the fact that comics have gone from being shameful to having some actual glamour about them, aside from the immense cultural influence that they have always had, which was denied for the most part. I think that what Bryan Singer thinks of Jack Kirby or what Christian Bale thinks of Batman are legitimate news. They are definitely on the softer side of news, but it's part of the whole fabric of the social history of comics, and that is what my field of interest is."

In citing influences, the first names that came to her mind when the Journal spoke with MacDonald in 2004 were not Seymour Hirsch or Bob Woodward or Hunter Thompson, but Gawker.com and Jim Mullen's Hot Sheet. Gawker is a gossipy entertainment blog with a funny, snarky tone. Mullen's Hot Sheet was (until he was replaced last year with a columnist with a more modern sense of glibness) a hopelessly square Entertainment Weekly column that offered 10 or 12 one-liners that could have come from index-card gags purchased from Bob Hope's estate. The main things Gawker and Hot Sheet have in common are celebrities and brevity.

The Journal followed up on this nearly a year later with a very long-winded question: "With models like these, it's not surprising that Clive Owen would make an appearance in The Beat (or that Bruce Campbell, Kung Fu Hustle and the little guy from Willow show up in this week's columns). To what extent is this approach a reflection of your own sensibility and to what extent is it endemic to the Web in general and online comics news in particular? Is there something about being at the center of a virtual maelstrom of pop culture that gives online reporter/commentators a heightened sense of absurdity? Certainly a snarky tone and serious journalism are not incompatible -- the old Spy magazine comes to mind. But that tone can also come to undercut itself and leave a reader with the impression that everything from creator rights to The Rock's new movie is equally frivolous."

Then the Journal condensed its question down to: "Is the comics industry driving you crazy?"

To which MacDonald responded: "Do you even need to ask me that? I think information overload is driving me and many other people crazy -- a study just came out showing that surfing the Internet for a while had the same effects as smoking a joint. I don't smoke pot, so I wouldn't know about that -- in the long run it would probably have a less deleterious effect on my attention span. A book just came out, as I'm sure you know, called Everything Bad Is Good For You by Steven Johnson that argues that video games and short-attention-span TV shows and so on actually make people smarter. I'm not going to go that far -- and I haven't read the book -- but intelligence does change as human culture does. In caveman days, being able to read animal tracks was the kind of intelligence that kept you alive. Nowadays we may not recognize spoor but we know how to Google! Irony seems to be the byproduct of the Age of Irony, with a brief break for 9/11. So there's no surprise that the Internet tends to specialize in snark -- people like to laugh and when you look at Internet news sources all day, they tend to talk a lot about monkeys and manatees and other "news of the weird" topics. I think the more you know about what goes on in the world, the bigger a sense of absurdity you develop, but that may just be me. Maybe the people who write pop culture blogs were all absurdists to begin with."

In the early interview, MacDonald also named two online comics-news colleagues as influences: "Dirk Deppey [now managing editor of the Journal] was obviously a huge influence in this with ¡Journalista!. There's a lot of stories out in the media about comics and cartoons and related fields, and people in comics need to know what is being said. It's my attempt to show what's hot. The Beat isn't one-stop shopping like Dirk was -- I just don't have the energy for that -- but hopefully, it hits the high notes. The other influence was Rick Veitch's old Splash, which was the behind-the-scenes, nosy gossip sheet for comics. I haven't quite developed the level of scandal-mongering that Rich had. That's also under development."

Veitch, the proprietor of Comicon.com, followed Splash with The Pulse, which is edited and largely written by Jennifer Contino. MacDonald wrote for Pulse before breaking off with The Beat. According to MacDonald, the Beat approach and the Pulse approach are different enough that there is no need to coordinate which will cover a given news item.

The Journal suggested to MacDonald that when she conceived The Beat as a column to supplement The Pulse, she might have taken the opportunity to do longer, more serious, more in-depth stories as compared to The Pulse's broad, brief coverage of the comics and pop-culture market. Instead, in moving from a weekly to a daily schedule, The Beat seems to have fallen into the same pattern as The Pulse, endeavoring to provide readers with a constant stream of quick takes on a broad range of content. If anything, The Beat's choice of content is often even lighter and breezier than The Pulse's. Does Internet culture demand this approach?

MacDonald said, "I wish Scott McCloud were here, because I think he could speak to the fact that looking at a computer screen is different from reading a book or even a magazine. I think there is something inherently different about how we perceive content on the screen than on the printed page, and it is a smaller bit of information. But the main reason is the economic model. Websites that have firewalled content like WSJ or Salon are more known for their in-depth coverage. The Internet is free entertainment for whoever has a computer and a fast connection. I've done full-length essays and interviews on The Beat, but there's no way I could do that every day, or even every week. People can fill up a lot of space with typing, but that doesn't mean it's good writing. (Obviously I hope I fall somewhere in the middle ground.)"

Spurgeon had ventured the opinion that a lot of people just want to be quickly informed about the top headlines, with maybe a laugh thrown in. The Pulse seems to serve that purpose, as do The Comics Reporter, Comic Book Resources, Newsarama and every other comics news site that comes to mind. Few do a better job of it than The Beat, but the prevalence of this approach raises a number of questions. Is the Information Age characterized by a curiosity that extends only the length of a blurb? Ideally, a blog should offer a visitor both options -- the blurb summary and a link to the fuller story -- but as this series has observed, a network of blogs has emerged that seem to simply link one blurb to another. If, as MacDonald argues, the Internet has long surpassed the print medium in its delivery of news and if more and more people are relying on the Net to inform them, doesn't that make it more important that the Net take journalistic goals and principles seriously?

"The bottom line," MacDonald replied, "as I'm sure you know, is that real investigation takes a long time. Sure maybe you call up someone and he or she spills the beans, but then there is the opposite side to be heard from, facts to be checked and so on. Great stories aren't necessarily just lying by the side of the road to be plastered onto the Internet. They have to be mined and shaped. Even when it isn't digging up stories, The Beat -- and The Comics Reporter -- both function as gatekeepers. Busy people don't have time to read 150 websites every day like I do, so they pay us to read them and give them the most important facts. I do survey a lot of media every day, so it's probably easier for me to pick up on general trends of comics coverage and so on. For instance, in the first four months of the year, comics coverage in the outside media was at an all-time high, and overwhelmingly positive. It really was approaching fad status, and it kind of had its apotheosis with the debut of Sin City, which everyone knew was a comic-book movie, and Free Comic Book Day. I think you've answered your own question. The Pulse, Newsarama, Comics Reporter and The Beat are all essentially one-person operations with a few support staffers or columnists. Spend a month running a daily Webster and see how it develops. Not everyone can do it. Look how many people start blogs and stop one week later. I think when Dirk set the bar with ¡Journalista!, he had half the sources to cover blogwise -- and I know for a fact that coverage of comic books in conventional media has skyrocketed. I suspect it's peaking right now, in fact. Even Saintly Dirk did only occasional think pieces."

MacDonald averages more than five stories a day for The Beat, a pace which was also a limiting factor in the depth of her reports when she spoke with the Journal last year. At that time, she said, "The Web is now where news begins. Someone even made a chart of this a few months ago. In terms of comics, blogs, personal websites, message boards, not to mention The Pulse and Newsarama... this is where the comics news breaks. It's gotten to the point where Wizard had to have a special deal with DC and Marvel to make sure they set up embargoes on stories for them. There's no way Wizard could compete with the Web otherwise, and as it is, it's kind of a gentleman's agreement that people won't break the print embargo -- but it's kind of ludicrous because it gets broken all the time. However, since print is still better financed, via advertising and so on, print writers are better paid and have more time to do in-depth reporting and better writing, in theory. I'll give you a perfect example: If you read The Beat when it was a weekly column, it was a lot more structured and, I think in some ways, better written then the daily Beat because I had a whole week to think about what I was going to write, not 20 minutes. Sometimes I regret not having time to rewrite anything on The Beat... but with a daily new site, you just can't. In an ideal world, I would have a paid assistant and an office I went to, and I would have more time to investigate things. Because I'm well aware of the stuff that hasn't even had the surface scratched. But that's a platonic ideal... the reality is that on the Internet, content is king, and The Beat can't survive without daily content. I wish I was faster or less easily distracted, but I can't make my brain work in a way it can't work. My own attention span mitigates against doing too much of anything for too long. I do have some longer stories that I've been working on. Hopefully, it will be a mix. I consider The Beat to be in beta."

Judging from the similarity between MacDonald's answers in 2004 and her answers today (today being roughly a month ago as you read this in print), online news hasn't so much advanced in the last year as it has proliferated and sped up. In other words, it has become more of what it was before. "There are some 35-45,000 blogs created every day," she said. "Basically, earlier this year Internet usage surged, if you can believe that. Throughout February and March websites were crashing left and right, partly due to worm attacks, but just because people seemed to be surfing even more -- hard to believe it's possible. We are drowning in content. Right now, blogging is very faddish -- bloggers are getting blogged about and reported on. Blogs are going through the Schroedinger's cat thing: Now that everyone is paying attention to them, are they going to change? I spend some of my laughable spare time following along with the thoughts of the 'new media' crowd, or whatever they are called. A lot of the eventual future of online journalism will be dependent on technology as the cell phone becomes more and more like a portable computer. Personally, I've never given up my dream of having a tricorder."

Another obstacle to the futhering of any journalistic goals, she said, is "the fact that everyone seems to think I'm out to air their dirty laundry. When I was doing The Pulse full-time, people tended to suck up to me a lot more, hoping for a story. Now a lot of people just leave the room or start whispering when I show up. It's kind of funny."

Asked if some stories have been difficult for her to cover because she knew some of the principals personally or because those principals could affect her career, MacDonald said, "Luckily or unfortunately, depending on your viewpoint, I know an awful lot of people, so it's kind of equal-time favoritism. I'm in quite a unique position in the industry in that I have done so many different things and know so many people on so many different levels. But as I think I told you in my first interview, a long time ago I realized that I couldn't write something I wouldn't say to a person's face, and as difficult as it is, I try to stick by that guideline."

In an industry as small and closely connected as the comics industry, depending on what one is willing to say to someone's face, such a guideline could conceivably render a reporter pretty ineffectual as an investigative journalist. Asked if the fact that comics reporters are likely to be pals with many of the people they are covering is a potential source of compromise, MacDonald told the Journal, "It's a pretty incestuous business, and almost every reporter is pals with certain people. I think that's part of what contributes to the general softness of the coverage. The Beat is a lot more 'personality based' than most places, so I just try to be up-front about my biases. I think everyone knows I'm good friends with a few people, but if, say, Trish Mulvihill got arrested for plotting to blow up City Hall, I would link to that story. I would just recuse myself from covering it. On a personal level, it's an interesting journey. The first time someone I'd known for 20 years lied to my face about something I knew was true, I was kind of upset. But after having been at this for almost a year, I'm developing a lot thicker skin about this because the roles are all different. I now realize that that lie was because of the power of the press, not a personal betrayal.

"In the end, no one in comics really wants any investigative journalism. I think I have a harder time covering stories just because no one in comics is ready for any kind of investigative journalism rather than anything personal against me. I'm sure you have discovered this yourself. Newsarama, CBR, The Pulse and Wizard are all basically 'friendly' journalistic outlets, for all intents and purposes. Although Newsarama and The Pulse do occasional reporting, it doesn't behoove Matt Brady or Jen Contino to dig up all the skeletons that they know about. I know from personal experience, even doing The Beat, that the pressure on journalists to ignore everything that isn't a press release is intense. I've been told that if I covered certain things all cooperation would 'end,' which is pretty funny because most of the cooperation I get is press releases."

When it comes to simple factual accuracy, MacDonald argued that the Net has the advantage over print. "If anything," she said, "on the Web, there's an even greater impetus to be accurate, because five minutes after you post something you'll have 1,000 people correcting your spelling and pointing out factual mistakes."

Having an advantage with respect to accuracy, however, is not the same as actually being more accurate, and MacDonald acknowledged that " the Web does have a tremendous 'shoot from the hip' style. Because of the volume and churn, there isn't time to go in and rewrite things. That isn't actually inherent in the Web, but it's the economic model at the present time. I do imagine that Web advertising will grow -- as it already is -- and someday there will be more time for people to write, as there is in print."

Asked to point to stories she takes some pride in, the first one that came to MacDonald's mind in 2004 was "the Superboy copyright story, which had been circling around, but I was the first person to really break it with factual back-up." Unfortunately some of that factual back-up was less than factual. In explaining copyright claims filed by the heirs of Joe Shuster and Jerry Siegel, The Beat reported that authors were allowed a five-year window to reclaim copyrights beginning 35 years after the original copyright assignment. The correct period of time for works created before 1978 (such as Superboy) was 56 years from the original copyright assignment, not 35. Playing its part as a helpful member of the Web community, the Journal e-mailed MacDonald to point out the mistake, then watched in vain for the correction to appear online.

MacDonald also felt good about her convention coverage, about which she said, "My San Diego wrap-up 'The Norman Conquests,' even though it was more of an opinion piece, was quoted all over the place. I was very proud of that piece, because I really did sit down and write it in one go."

In April, the Journal again asked MacDonald to cite some stories from The Beat that would counterbalance the Clive Owen side of the scale. Her immediate response was "two in-depth interviews with Frank Miller and Bruce Campbell that I was very proud of," but she broke off at that point, apparently recognizing that an interview with the star of Evil Dead might not be the best corrective of her Clive Owen coverage, and added, "-- although those were probably more entertainment-centric than comics-centric. I also broke the 'Marvel in 7-Elevens' story... and I'm sure there is more, but after doing this 10 months, it is all one big blur of sound and color." Probably obscured somewhere in that blur is the fact that MacDonald "broke" the "Marvel in 7-Elevens" story after the company issued a press release announcing the 7-Eleven deal and after the company posted a streaming video of the meeting at which the deal was announced on its website.

Prodding MacDonald to come up with examples of in-depth journalism from The Beat is probably unfair, however, since she makes no pretence of having achieved that goal on a regular basis. "I really do want to have regular in-depth interviews," she said, "but I have to find a way to make that logistically feasible. It does come down to time versus money. If some wonderful person out here reading this wants to sponsor The Beat Interview, you know where to find me!"

Finally, MacDonald offered much the same defense that Spurgeon had been prepared to extend her: The Beat is what it is because she is who she is. "Perhaps the ultimate answer to any question regarding The Beat is a very simple one," she said "-- it is me. Every aspect of it is an extension of my strengths and weaknesses. I'm snoopy and sarcastic and I like pirates, Hugo Pratt and Amon Tobin and I happen to have some powers of observation and the ability to put them down in writing. That's it in a nutshell. It's very gratifying to know that something that is basically an extension of my own personality has a daily readership of thousands of people. So I don't want to let them down. At the moment, I don't have the resources of time to do as much in-depth reporting as I would like, so I try to make up for it by being as informative and entertaining as I can, while still allowing for a meager social life."

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