The document traces the history of online journalism from the 1960s to the present. It discusses early technologies like teletext and videotext in the 1970s and the creation of the internet and World Wide Web in the 1980s and 1990s. The rise of online news sites in the 1990s is covered along with the growth of citizen journalism through blogging and user-generated content in the 2000s. Issues around developing financial models for online news are also discussed.

1. 1
History of
Online Journalism
By
Vishnu Achutha Menon

2. 2
1963
• Ted Nelson, Harvard
sociology student
• Formulates the
concept of hypertext

3. 3
1965
• Nelson, now a sociology prof at Vassar College in upstate
New York
• Gives a lecture which is covered in the student newspaper.
The first print reference of “hypertext” appears, Feb. 3,
1965

4. 4
1969
• ARPANET computer network created by the
U.S. Defense Department
• The forerunner of today’s Internet
• Their goal: Design a computer network to
withstand nuclear attack

5. 5
1969
• Decentralized system created under the basic
assumption that parts of the network will fail
• Building the network this way lays the
foundation for the Internet as a medium that
is controlled by no single entity
• 1972: The organization in charge is now
called DARPA (Defense Advanced Research
Projects Agency)

6. 6
1971
• The BBC files for
a patent on
“Teledata,” the
first teletext
system
• Called a
"Rolodex in the
sky”
At the same time, a
parallel technology …

7. 7
1971
• A loop of “pages”
broadcast on TV
• Not interactive
• Service is limited
to a few hundred
available pages
• Slow
Teletext:

8. 8
1974
The British Post Office’s Research
Laboratory demonstrates
“Viewdata” (later “Prestel”) the
first Videotext service
• It’s truly interactive, supporting
two-way communication
• You use your TV, hooked up to
cable and a phone line
• You make entries using a
keyboard, dedicated terminal or
computer
• Menu-driven systems allow users
to browse
• Better graphics than teletext;
even photo display.

9. 9
1974
Snapshot: Three competing technologies …
• Not
interactive
• Slow
• But all you
need is a TV
and a decoder
box
Videotext
Teletext
• Interactive
• You need
cable TV
and an
expensive
subscription
• Interactive
• Very
expensive
• Poorly
networked
• Almost no
one has one
Computers

10. 10
1975
• Canada begins
development of
Telidon, an
advanced
videotext system.
Goes into operation
in 1979 and is
considered a world
leader with
advanced graphics
technology

11. 11
1975

12. 12
1981-82
First computer-based
online dial-up services
emerge Eg.:
• Compuserve
• The Source
• Prodigy
These are closed
systems -- only
subscribers have
access

13. 13
1983-1985
• 1983: Time Magazine names the
computer “Machine of the Year”
• 1984: Apple introduces the Macintosh
computer. Cost: $2,495 US with built-in
B&W monitor. Within 75 days, 50,000 are
sold
• 1985: Worldwide 22 nations are said to
be involved in videotext and teletext

14. 14
1986-1988
• 1986: Computers readily available in university
computer labs, offices
Computers becoming cheaper and more powerful;
first personal printers appear; ($7,000 US for an
Apple LaserWriter)
• 1988: Internet Relay Chat (IRC, a forebearer to
instant messaging) is developed by Finnish
graduate student Jarkko Oikarinen
DARPA makes the Internet public

15. 15
1990
• Hypertext Markup
Language is invented
by Tim Berners-Lee,
an Englishman, and
colleagues at CERN,
the European Particle
Physics Laboratory

16. 16
1992
• July: Lynx, a non-graphical Web and Gopher
(FTP) “browser” is released by the University
of Kansas
• November: There are 26 “reasonably reliable”
servers exist on the World Wide Web,
according to CERN

17. 17
1993
• August: Mosaic, first
graphical Web browser
for Windows, is released
by the University of
Illinois. It causes the
web to grow at a
341,634% annual rate
of service traffic
• Sept. 25: CompuServe, Prodigy and AOL have a
combined 3.9 million U.S. subscribers

18. 18
1993
• October: First journalism site on the Web is
launched at the University of Florida. There
now are about 200 web servers in the world
• Dec. 8: First article about the web appears in
the New York Times

19. 19
1994
• Jan. 19: The first newspaper
to regularly publish on the
Web, the Palo Alto Weekly in
California, begins twice-
weekly postings of its full
content
• April: The Yahoo “Internet
index” is started by Stanford
PhD candidates David Filo
and Jerry Yang

20. 20
1994
• June:
the first
Canadian
newspaper,
the Halifax
Daily News
goes online

21. 21
1995
April 19: Oklahoma
City Bombing
The first major event
in which people turn
to the Internet for
current information

22. 22
1995
• May: More than 150
news outlets in North
America now have
online editions
• October: The Boston
Globe launches
Boston.com on the
Web, a unique site
bringing many local
services together

23. 23
1997
• March 26: “Heaven’s
Gate” Suicides
The Internet becomes
part of a major news
story when members
of the Heaven’s Gate
cult create a website
before committing
suicide. Journalists
point readers to their
source material

24. 24
1997
• March: False reports emerge
online that TWA Flight 800,
which crashes off Long Island in
1996 was brought down by a
U.S. navy missile
• The power of the medium
becomes apparent as readers
pressure investigators to reveal
the “truth”

25. 25
1997
• The Smoking
Gun debuts -- it
publishes entire
court
documents and
other primary
sources online

26. 26
1997
• The Dallas Morning News
online edition gets an
exclusive that Timothy
McVeigh has claimed
responsibility for the
Oklahoma City Bombing
• First time a mainstream news
organization breaks a major
story on its website -- not in
its newspaper

27. 27
1998
• Jan. 19 -- Early reports of
U.S. President Clinton’s
involvement with White
House intern Monica
Lewinsky demonstrate
how a small independent
news site can seize a
national news
agenda

28. 28
1998
• A media frenzy
follows in both
the online and
traditional
press

29. 29
1998
• September: Starr
Report
A new relationship
between politicians
and the public –
Starr bypasses the
press and
distributes a major
political document
online first
Kenneth Starr

30. 30
2000
Mainstream news
sites begin to involve
their audience
• Death of Pierre Trudeau:
Thousands of Canadians
tell their stories on news
websites

31. 31
2001
• Sept. 11:
Online news
operations
stumble …

32. 32
2001
… then recover …

33. 33
2003
Classified listings
flee print ... and
take money with
them

34. 34
2003
• Canada.com
moves to paid
subscription
model
• Breaking news
is free
• Other content
requires $$

35. 35
2003
• The dawn of
citizen
journalism
• Blogging
software makes
web publishing
easy and
eliminates the
need to know
HTML
• The “Baghdad Blogger” captivates the world

36. 36
2004
• Bloggers
lead the
way in
forcing CBS
to retract
its story on
George W.
Bush’s
military
service

37. 37
• Bloggers
beat the
mainstream
media to
tsunami-
ravaged
South-East
Asia …
2004

38. 38
… bringing
home the
reality of the
event with
amateur
video
2004

39. 39
2005
Mainstream
media starts
harnessing
user-generated
video

40. 40
News sites
rush to
establish
citizen
communitie
s
2005

41. 41
2005
Major trend: “A growing number of news
outlets are chasing relatively static or even
shrinking audiences for news. One result of this
is that most sectors of the news media are losing
audience.
The only sectors seeing general audience
growth today are online, ethnic and
alternative media.”

42. 42
2006
Katrina
Bloggers win
protections in
the U.S. …

43. 43
2006
… and
acceptance in
Canada

44. 44
Participatory
journalism advocate
Dan Gillmor tries
(and fails) to put
his emerging
philosophy into
practice
2006

45. 45
2006
Time
Magazine
Person
of the
Year

46. 46
“More sites were becoming profitable … [but] rivals
on the Web that offer classified listings or aggregate
other people’s work -- but produce very little
journalistic content of their own -- were continuing to
steal revenues away. There still appears no clear
path for transferring to this new medium all the
wealth that has long financed journalism for the
good of civil society.”
2006

47. 47
2007
Bloggers face
greater legal
scrutiny

48. 48
2007
Citizen media grows in importance

49. 49
2007

50. 50
2007
New attempts at models for citizen journalism

51. 51
2007

52. 52
2007

53. 53
2007
“Practicing journalism has become far more difficult and
demands new vision. Journalism is becoming a
smaller part of people’s information mix …
“Journalists have reacted relatively slowly … There are
signs that government, corporations and activists have
reacted more quickly. Politicians, interest groups and
corporate public relations people tell us they have
bloggers now on secret retainer — and they are
delighted with the results.”

54. 54
“The evidence is mounting that the news industry must
become more aggressive about developing a new
economic model. The signs are clearer that advertising
works differently online than in older media.
“Finding out about goods and services on the Web is an
activity unto itself, like using the yellow pages, and less
a byproduct of getting news, such as seeing a car ad
during a newscast. The consequence is that
advertisers may not need journalism as they once
did, particularly online.”
2007

55. 55
2007
• September:
Journalism sites
move away from
subscription-based
news
• Advertising is seen
as the only
workable funding
model

56. 56
2008
“As a category, news Web sites appear to be falling
behind financially. They are not growing in advertising
revenue as quickly as other kinds of Internet
destinations. And these figures do not include the most
important revenue source, search, where news is a
relatively small player.
The questions of who will pay and how they will do it
seem more pressing than ever.”

57. 57
2008

58. 58
2008

59. 59
59
What is the Internet?
The Internet is
a network of computers

60. 60
60
What is the World Wide
Web?
• Created in 1990 when
Englishman Tim Berners-Lee
and colleagues at the
European Center for Particle
Physics developed a
computer language that
enabled users to navigate
by clicking on underlined
words called links.
Tim Berners-Lee

61. 61
61
What is the World Wide
Web?
• The language:
Hypertext Markup Language.

62. 62
62
What is the World Wide
Web?
• The Web is a place where people do
things
– buy airline tickets
– search for recipes
– read about disease
– read and interact with the news
– buy computers
– listen to the radio
– other things?

63. 63
63
What makes the Web
different?
• Capacity
– Nearly unlimited space, limited only by human decisions
and high-capacity servers
• Flexibility
– words, pictures, audio, video, graphics
• Immediacy
– Information as events unfold
– Sept. 11, tsunami, hurricanes
– Breadth, or expansion (several angles to the same topic)
– Depth (quality and depth of information about an
individual story)
• Permanence
– Nothing need be lost
• Interactivity
– Immediate feedback channel
– email links, forums, polls

64. 64
64
Lessons learned
• Online services must be personally useful
– Popularity of email and search engines
• Interactivity is a key element
– weakness of traditional media, but not online
journalism
• Content must be free unless it is very
specialized
– Wall Street Journal sells subscriptions
– Ebay makes commissions
– Second layer (page 2) to espn.com
– Adult sites make money
• Real money is not in the technology but in the
programming
– Advertisers will pay money if the audience is there
for the content

65. 65
65
Summary
• Roots of the WWW go back three
decades
• Like most inventions, the WWW was
more like an evolution than an
invention
• Teletext  Videotext  BBS  WWW
• WWW gives journalists a new, unique
and interactive way to tell the story.