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A thought about the history of journalism


If we want a date for the birth of the world wide web (www), considered as an available and useful toolfor journalism, we are probably best off fixing on March 1989, the month when Tim Berners-Lee, a

computer scientist working for the European research organization CERN, wrote up his proposal for

Hypertext Transfer Protocol (http), something that would which allow not just the geniuses at CERN

but … anybody … to use a browser and set up a web server, and get a website started.

It took a while yet for a lot of institutions and then individuals around the world to catch on.

When one thinks about the disruptive impact of Berners-Lee’s innovation upon mass media, there is a temptation to think of this as a one-time-only bomb. In the days of old there was the world we think of in connection with Clark and Lois in the newsroom of the Daily Planet as depicted in the black-and-white television show of yore: old-style manual typewriters, landline telephones, and coffee pots -- and in another building nearby a printing press that lurked like a big clanking monster. Every once in a while, breaking news forced an editor to rush to the printing plant shouting “STOP THE PRESSES!” bringing the loud metallic sounds to a halt That world lived on, more or less, until hypertext came into the picture, and the history of a very different industry got underway.

Except of course that it didn’t happen that way. The newsroom has always been vulnerable to technological disruptions, and several important ones paved the way for that of the hypertext transfer protocol. Let’s look very briefly at three: First, as cell phone technology developed, reporting became a more mobile activity, unbound from the location of the news room and its landline. Second, and over the same period, typewriters evolved into word processors -- semiautomated machines widely available beginning in the early 1970s that allowed various degrees of editing, correction, word wrap-around, and other useful features. 

There is also the story of the mainframe computer, used by news organizations as early as the mid 1950s for such matters as processing payroll and storing subscriber data. These computers  became continuously less expensive, more accessible to a wider range of institutions, and less bulky as the years and decades ticked by. The labels by which they were marketed give away the importance of portability. The 1960s saw “mini-computers” and the 1970s “micro-computers.”

Looking backward, the disruption of the Old School journalism beloved of classic Hollywood looks like the convergence of these three trends: toward greater mobility, more digitized content creation, and thoroughly computerized operations. Since the early 1990s, the scene has of course continued to change, but in ways prefigured by that earlier period. 


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