University of North TexasDepartment of JournalismOnline Journalism 3340

Sept. 17, 2009

Early Days of The Web

Today’s classWebsite of the DayCool online tool of the dayTypes of convergenceREAD for next week:

Teens Know What They Want From Online News: Do You?

http://www.naafoundation.org/Research/Foundation/Youth-Content/Teens-Know-What-They-Want-From-Online-News.aspx

The Early Days –News WebsitesThe Evolution

Mainly straight text, no graphicsBulletin boards (BBS), forums ruledMinimal investment

Late 70s/early 80s: VideoText Miami Herald: Viewtron Belo: BISON – Belo Information Systems On-line Progidy: Cowboys Content

Knight Ridder, Tribune: $30 millionRegurgitation: What was in print showed up

onlineNo staffs – Gungho geeks who become mavericks

of their time

Dedicated keyboard/terminal that could only be used for the videotext service. This equipment cost $600 to $900; later, as personal computing caught on,Viewtron would try to sell its services via IBM, Apple, or Commodore PCs.

A television set to display the color images, which took time to load or paint

A monthly subscription fee of $12 (the first month was free) A phone line to send information back to a central computer,

for which the consumer initially paid $1 an hour

Source: Poynter.org: “Before there was the Internet, There was Viewtron”, by Howard Finberg, http://www.poynter.org/content/content_view.asp?id=52769

The Miami Herald, then owned by Knight-Ridder, invested $17mm in 1984

http://iml.jou.ufl.edu/carlson/history/ScreenShots/Fred_the_computer.jpg

1993: September 2: Middlesex (Mass.) News launches first Internet gopher-based online newspaper.

January 1994: Salt Lake Tribune opens a BBS called

Utah Online. http://iml.jou.ufl.edu/carlson/history/ScreenShots/utah_online.jpg

Interactive toolsWeb pollsDiscussion forumsBlogsPersonalization

Yahoo, Google