By Gabriel Spitzer

    New media’s mantra for the year 2000 might be summed up thusly: It seemed like a good idea at the time.
    It's certainly an appropriate mantra for WebMD, the health web site that announced this week that it's terminating its 50 percent stake in Fox Cable’s Health Network, as well as dramatically scaling back its partnership with Fox parent News Corp.
    At this point, the collapse of the deal may seem almost anti-climactic, coming after months in which one once-bold dot.com venture after another suddenly announced that it was shuttering operations, having run out of money.
    But it's worth remembering that this deal was the biggie, involving big bucks, big media companies and big cross-media expectations. When the $1 billion deal was first announced, News Corp. chairman Rupert Murdoch called it an "ideal partnership."
    The hiring of former ABC president Pat Fili-Krushel in March to head WebMD Health symbolized as much as anything the high hopes for the enterprise.
    Now those visions of grandeur have come nose-to-nose with market realities, and suddenly figuring out exactly where WebMD’s profits are going to come from is more important.
    Although one might first assume that it was News Corp. who bolted from the deal like a venture capitalist with his pants on fire, it was actually the web site that initiated the separation.
    WebMD is also learning the lesson that old-media companies teach over and over: branching out content over different media platforms isn’t as easy as it looks.
   Industry observers suspect that WebMD is spread too thin to devote time and resources to the network.
    "At the time, the markets were saying that it’s okay to make all these deals, as long as they would pay off eventually," says Brad Aronson, president of i-FRONTIER, a Philadelphia-based interactive agency.
   "Now they’ve got to worry about integrating all the properties they’ve acquired into their business, and I don’t think they have the time to really make the network gel until they figure out what their core business is."
    WebMD has spent the last few years acquiring big companies like Healtheon and Medcast and establishing multi-million dollar partnerships with the likes of DuPont and Microsoft, to name a few. The site aspired to be a one-stop shop for health content and services, serving both consumers and health professionals.
   In the meantime, the company’s stock has shriveled up, and WebMD, like so many of its new media brethren, suddenly had a lot of people wondering when the profits were going to come.
   Now WebMD is undergoing a restructuring in order to speed up the journey toward profitability, and their recent moves suggest that they are inching away from a consumer-oriented framework and concentrating on a B2B model that meshes services for physicians, patients and insurers.
   That sort of business may not make for great television.
    And so the search continues for a formula that actually brings TV and the web together.
     The year 2000 saw a string of underachieving enterprises of this sort. Oxygen Media’s cable network is one notable example, and eBay’s television project has been meeting with snores. The phrase "interactive TV" is starting to sound like the punch line to a joke involving meals in a pill and flying cars.
    "There have been very few crossovers that have worked. The idea of creating TV shows off of magazines, for instance, never really took off," says Channing Dawson, senior vice president of new ventures for Scripps networks. Dawson oversees the web ventures for Scripps’ Food Network, HGTV and DIY Network.
    "I think it’s a cultural issue. People are conditioned to gather and produce relevant content for a particular platform. Putting a magazine person and a TV person in the same room is like men versus women; there are different sets of values, and it’s hard to put those cultures together."
    The marriage of the web and television is riddled with thorny issues, particularly at a time when old media companies are regarding online companies with a wary eye.
    "When you’re talking about convergence, I don’t think anybody knows yet how to put it together. Who bears responsibility for the bottom line? Is it okay in the short term if the web company doesn’t carry equal weight? News Corp. doesn’t want its cash sucked into WebMD’s problems," says Eric Scheirer, an analyst at Forrester Research.
      If the past is any indication, it is much easier to parlay a loyal television audience into web traffic than the other way around. People have their interest piqued on TV, and they seek more information online. How to make that process run in reverse direction remains a mystery.
    An example of television working well with the web is Dawson’s FoodTV.com. In that case, the network has pounced on one sticky "killer app" that can move viewers from their TV to their PC and back: recipes. Dishes are prepared and presented on television, and the recipes are all online.
     "Our context is informational, so we’re aligned for that convergence. Something more interpretive or entertainment-oriented is a much harder play. And to be encyclopedic in your coverage is very hard. It requires a huge investment," says Dawson.
   Indeed, trying to be all things to all people is proving too tough a task for most new media companies, WebMD included. That is not to say that a cable health network is not in the company’s future, but perhaps not until the site finds its identity.
   "There is no magic formula, or we’d all be flying to it. There isn’t even a model. This is still the wild west," says Dawson.

-Gabriel Spitzer is a staff writer for Media Life.

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