The web has changed the way we do so many things, especially the way we consume news. The video below is a 1981 news story about reading newspapers online. It’s quaint, and there’s a sci-fi quality about it. Several newspapers engaged in a then-time consuming task of putting print news stories online. Check out those computers! (In fact, technology changes so fast that computers made at the turn of the century look ancient. Then again, that was almost a decade ago…)
David Cole of the San Francisco Examiner describes his paper’s experiment. They were trying to “figure out what it’s going to mean to us as editors and reporters and what it means to the home user. And we’re not in it to make money…We’re probably not going to lose a lot [either]…”
Man. Little did they know. Good thing they weren’t in it to make money. The world wide web caused newspapers to lose money as print readership dropped and advertisers went online. Laid-off editors and reporters and former owners of shuttered newspapers owe their downturn to the computer.
