Stone says she got lucky with the timing of her fellowship. She had already planned to leave Women.com because she says the site’s recent merger with iVillage, another women’s site, had “buried” its focus on hard news.
Stone started out in print journalism, working for several papers in the San Francisco Bay area. She moved to CNN in 1995 and worked there for two years before moving to Internet journalism. At Women.com, she was the lead editor of the site’s original content, managing the site’s staff of 20 producers.
During her year at Harvard, Stone plans to talk with Kennedy School of Government, Harvard Business School and MIT experts and study marketing data about how people use news websites.
She cites statistics that women are getting more of their news from the Internet than from traditional media sources as evidence that Internet media need to think about what kind of news women are looking for at websites.
The question, she says, is, “Why women are taking seven hours a week away from TV, magazine and radio—when we know the top sites include a lot of news sites.”
Since the Internet makes it easy for people to buy products and communicate with others, she says news websites should focus more on what she calls “service journalism.”
For example, Stone says an “ideal page” about new RU-486 research would show readers where they could obtain the “morning-after” pill and show where to go for more information about research. Since RU-486 is a controversial topic, Stone’s ideal web story would also link to pro and con sites, as well as showing users how to get in touch with their representatives and senators.
Stone says she has not planned beyond her year with the Nieman Foundation, conceding that she is part of the “dot-com dead pool.”
“The ’70s came back and so will the Internet,” she says, “so I am very interested to see what opportunities are available and what promises to be an important 12 months for news media online and off.”
—Staff writer Andrew S. Holbrook can be reached at holbr@fas.harvard.edu.