RootsWorld
Five year-old Internet Grandaddy
by Peggy Latkovich
Cliff Furnald laughs incredulously when he thinks back on how much technology has changed since March 1995. That's when his e-zine, RootsWorld, was born.
Furnald has loved folk and world musics since his days as a string- band musician in high school and college. The vast riches to be had in the world of folk music didn't come his way, however. "The bands were labors of love that cost us money," laughed Furnald. "We paid for the privilege to play, mostly."
Always an avid record collector, Furnald drifted into doing a regular spot on Yale's radio station in the 70s.
Unfortunately, his show hit the chopping block when the station went from being community oriented to university oriented.
Undaunted, he made his first foray into print journalism. Furnald's "Radio Planet 3" column appeared in the first issue of Dirty Linen and has been one of the publication's most popular features since then. "It just spiraled out of control from there," he said, "I'm not an 'authority.' I'm not a musicologist or an ethno-anything. I'm just a musician and writer who happens to love pretty much all kinds of music. I'm always fascinated with how much things are alike rather than how different they are."
The shift to electronic journalism was a natural one. When RootsWorld started up, he was (and still is) a programmer at radio station WPKN in New Haven. A friend was starting an Internet provider and invited Furnald to jump on board. Back then, the Internet was in its infancy, made up of a few college geeks designing homemade web browsers. "Netscape and Internet Explorer were just barely ideas back then," said Furnald. The Internet was primarily email and Gopher and Archie (remember them?). What tens of thousands of visitors each month now know and love as RootsWorld started out as a simple menu with text file.
His Dirty Linen reviews served as the original content for RootsWorld. In 1995, it was rare to find anything that resembled content on the Internet. "The Internet was just links to links to links," said Furnald, "You could go around in a circle and find yourself back at your own website without having actually read anything."
The 'zine today is a user-friendly, cleanly designed trip through what's new and best in current world music. The content consists largely of reviews, articles, "Roots Radio" (a variety of programs to listen to), the Jukebox (samples of individual artists' work), and, of course, FAQs and Letters to the Editor. First-time users will be confronted with repeated pleas to subscribe. Yes, RootsWorld is a free and open site, but yes, it costs money to produce. Furnald uses a public radio-style subscriber drive, relying on the consciences of users. For their 20 bucks a year, subscribers get free CDs, an email newsletter that gives them reviews in advance, unlimited access to the Jukebox, and a password that spares them the subscriber appeal pop-ups.
Furnald also accepts advertising on the site, but selectively. Most advertisers are record labels and individual artists. As a visual artist, the appearance of the site is important to him. "I don't want gleaming, glistening ads on every page," he says, "People are reading! I don't want blinking lights that say 'Eat at Joe's' to be flashing around not only good writing, but some of the gorgeous pictures that we've published."
Currently, the 'zine has about 500 subscribers. Furnald said that he'd love to have 10,000, "just like a real magazine." The nature of the content keeps the numbers low. "The material is not geared toward an audience so much as the audience gravitates toward what is written," said Furnald. He resists compromising the site's integrity by becoming, as he calls it, "a tip sheet on what to buy. The Internet has fulfilled that old British axiom about becoming a nation of shopkeepers. We are now a planet of shopkeepers. If there is one thing I want to do it's to resist that shopkeeper mentality that has completely overwhelmed the dot-com planet. There's less and less viable content out there and more and more content that's being driven by the products that are being sold."
Furnald's personality has a definite imprint on the site, though his actual written input is small. "I'd like to think that my personality runs through RootsWorld despite the fact that my verbiage is only about 10 percent," he said, "which means that the other 90 percent is reflecting some other, weird, subtler aspect of who the editor is." About 20 writers contribute to the site, most of whom approached him about submitting their work. Some come from the ranks of other publications, such as Dirty Linen or Folk Roots. He likes to encourage his writers to stretch their journalistic legs a bit. "I like to push people into areas they may not be familiar with," he said, "Somebody who knows a lot about Gypsy music, I might push them toward doing something on a central French band just because they've got good ears. I can tell from people's writing who's hearing the music as opposed to who knows about the genre. Sometimes just knowing the genre is not going to make you the best reviewer or interviewer."
With a couple of clicks of his mouse, Furnald pinpoints exactly when RootsWorld's first subscriber came on board (May 3, 1997 at 5:49 p.m., for the trivia buff). He laughs again at the ease with which he is able to retrieve this information.
Furnald resisted speculating as to what the future will hold. "I learned a long time ago not to predict anything, because I'm wrong," he said. He would like to see the radio aspect of the site developed more, and would like to have more content in the way of articles and interviews. What drives the energetic Furnald is getting most of the music he loves to the people who want it. "I don't see it as 'world music' or 'folk music' so much as just 'good music.' "
Check out RootsWorld at www.RootsWorld.com
