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5 Ways Newspapers Botched the Web
nicholas.m.carlson writes "Remember Knight-Ridder and AT&T's Viewtron from 1983? With a $900 terminal and $12 a month, you could access news from the Miami Herald and the New York Times, online shopping, banking and food delivery, via a 300-baud modem. After sinking $16 million a year into the project, Knight-Ridder shut it down in 1986. That's just the earliest of the 5 newspaper failures on the Web that Valleywag details in this post, writing: 'each tale ends the same way: A promising start, shuttered amid fear, uncertainty, and doubt.'"
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In March of 1939 The St. Louis Post Dispatch began experimental public broadcasts of a nine page facsimile newspaper to the home using technology developed by RCA.
"So far as the transmitting equipment is concerned, it is the standard scanner manufactured by RCA, the output of which is fed into a 100-watt transmitter operating on 31,600 kc. We selected the ultra-high frequency band because it offered the opportunity of broadcasting facsimile during the day time--in fact any time we desire.
We have not experienced nearly as much trouble with interference on the ultra-high frequency band as was expected. The characteristics of the recorders are such that far more interference can be tolerated than is the case in the reception of sound broadcasting an these frequencies."
Within the next month RCA expects to be able to supply receivers at a cost of about $260. Several will be placed in public places for demonstration. The range of Station W9XZY is from 20 to 30 miles.
"On the first page of this "radio newspaper," now being received in every home in the St. Louis service area of W9XZY equipped with a facsimile receiver, are the leading news articles of the day. Then following sports news, several pages of pictures, Fitzpatrick's editorial cartoon, a summary of radio programs and radio gossip, and a page of financial news and stock market quotations."
The antenna of the receiver set in the home picks up these waves. The receiver, a closed cabinet with no dials to be operated or adjustments to be made by the owner, contains continuously-feeding rolls of paper and carbon paper which pass over a revolving metal cylinder from which a small stylus projects.
Pressure, varying with the intensity of the radio waves, is exerted on a metal bar, parallel to the axis of the cylinder, beneath which the paper and carbon is fed. Thus the black and white of the original copy scanned by the "electric eye" is duplicated on the paper passing over the cylinder of the receiving set which is synchronized with that of the sending mechanism.
It is unnecessary for the reader to be on hand when a broadcast begin since a clock, set for the scheduled time, will automatically start the receiving set and stop it at conclusion of broadcasting. It requires 15 minutes to transmit one page.
First Daily Newspaper by RADIO FACSIMILE
[as published in Radio-Craft, March 1939]
First off, it spoke NAPLPS -- basically, Flash before there was Flash. There was no text-only interface. So you got to stare at the screen as it drew almost pretty pictures at you, at 300 bits per second.
Now there was nothing intrinsically wrong with NAPLPS -- it was fairly sophisticated and portable for its day. Dave Hughes was a big champion of it. But since newspapers were vehicles for advertising, and advertising "requires" graphics, you spent a non-trivial amount of time waiting for the ad to render, then the UI, then the information you actually requested. It made the text-only services of the day like CompuServe and The Source seem speedy by comparison.
It still floors me that they plowed over 10 million 1980 dollars in to this thing. On-line sophisticates universally declared it as wretched, and there was no way it would ever have been appealing enough for someone to go out and drop large sums of money on new equipment to get access to it. (By the way, I'm pretty sure the Viewtron client I saw was running on a Commodore-64. Viewtron wouldn't have justified the purchase of the modem, much less the C64.)
Schwab
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
Wikinews (http://en.wikinews.org) (from the Wikimedia foundation). Many members have press cards.
$ make available
Absolutely wrong. It's unfortunate that people who make things up get modded up on Slashdot.
Liberty Media is a TV company. It has nothing to do with the Tribune Company, which owns the Los Angeles Times. The Tribune Company was taken private in a buyout led by Sam Zell, a real estate entrepreneur.
The Times has not "fired most of the staff." It has cut about 20 percent of its news staff. That's less than its circulation decline from 983,727 in 2004 to 773,884 in the most recent reports. It still has plenty of good people on its payroll.
The new publisher is Eddy Hartenstein, who is not from the newspaper business. He's the former CEO of DirecTV.
Based on my experience in the industry, it's not that they employ MBA's whose only goal is the bottom line, but rather that they employ execs who really have no business running the types of operations that they do.
Dyed-in-the-wool newspaper publishers get promoted to corporate VP positions, local marketing guys get promoted to run software divisions.
The people at the controls don't fully understand the businesses they're tasked with running, and it shows in the trail of bad decisions, written off investments and failed ventures.
I wish like the parent poster I hadn't touched newspaper stock. If I hadn't, I wouldn't be saddled with MNI shares that are worth 5% today of what they were a couple years ago, even with the employee discount.