On the freewheeling Internet, anyone can be a publisher, noted Howard Rheingold, author of several seminal books on new media and founder of the influential WELL on-line network. Those demonstrating the most innovative new-media products at Connections were not newspaper publishers--they were cable companies, advertisers developing their own content, and entepreneurs like Todd Chronis, president and publisher of WalkSoft, an interactive newspaper culled from wire services.
Yet the future is far from bleak. "The Internet will be the CB radio of the '90s," said Stephen Weiswasser, president of Capital Cities/ABC Inc.'s multimedia group. "You're not going to change passive [readers] into active trollers of the Internet....We're going to have to go to the folks who have traditional views of mass media."
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