Pathfinder Redux

Surely I date myself in recalling that great early debacle of Web content, Time Warner’s Pathfinder portal. Veterans of the digital space will recall a day when old media brought to the new medium a staggeringly naïve sense of entitlement. This was before Yahoo, Google, AOL, eBay, Amazon, MySpace, PerezHilton, BlackPlanet, MarketWatch (oh, why go on?) and countless other endemic Web brands taught established players brands that the online game had different rules. Pathfinder.com was Time Warner’s attempt to pull together all of its great magazines into a single multi-branded news and information portal that would serve the breadth and depth of user interests. No one cared. In what was the first sign of the Web’s disruptive force, the failure of Pathfinder demonstrated how little muscle the lumbering media conglomerates could flex here. Who cared that all of these different brands were Time Warner properties? Consumer didn’t identify with media goliaths. They identified with individual brands. And the coming years would show how little loyalty people showed even towards specific magazine titles online.

And so it is with a bit of nostalgia that I happened upon the “Breaking News” widget from Time Inc. that pulls together in a single box RSS streams from CNN Money, EW.com, SI.com and People.com. The ClearSpring widget is a pleasant enough looking portable news service that can go on most personal portal, blog or social network pages. What someone wants those particular brands in one package is a bit beyond me. Somehow the People and EW reader don’t seem to fall into the same target demo as CNN Money and SI. This looks and feels a lot like a mini-Pathfinder – just as misguided but somehow tolerable because of its meager ambitions. Other than their common corporate source, the brands don’t really go together. To its credit, the widget does let you choose your individual feeds and the default view, so you can filter it down to specific brands. But since that is the case, why not offer a universal widget that offers a customized view of all the Time and CNN brands? Of course, the widget is sponsored by Sony and its ubiquitous HDNA campaign, so we imagine Sony is picking up the bill here anyway.

Which is not to say that Time Inc. fails to leverage its multiple brands. In fact, the Time Warner sites as a whole are tremendous traffic drivers that can help push eyeballs from one brand to another.  To be sure, synergy is not the passé concept we may supposed. But this widget does remind us how far we are from the age of the dominant media network. People don’t buy into CBS, Time Warner, Fox, etc. as trusted sources of all information. If anything, the trend is moving in the opposite direction. In spin-off and acquired brands like TMZ (AOL) and MySpace (Fox), the media conglomerates almost try to hide their connection with their own progeny rather than confer some sort of provenance. The rapid decline and fall of Pathfinder was the first tremor in a media earthquake that continues to shake out. We still don’t know how consumers relate, let alone build loyalty to, medis brands in the Internet age.