Video: Web-like newspaper delivery in 1981

The Internet shouldn't have caught newspaper publishers by surprise. Early warnings that the Web could change their businesses cropped up as early as 1981.

A 28-year-old report from KRON-TV in San Francisco, a copy of which was found on YouTube, shows that newspapers were already experimenting with digital delivery to personal computer users.

"Imagine if you will," said a KRON female newscaster, "sitting down to your morning coffee and turning on your home computer to read the day's newspaper."

The following report is about how eight newspapers, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Los Angeles Times had joined a service that would send digital newspaper copies to home-computer owners via phone lines.

The service was crude by today's standards. The process of transferring a full digital newspaper to a computer took two hours. The service charged $5 an hour so it meant spending $10 to obtain a paper that could be had for 20 cents at the corner newsstand. Still, KRON reported that of the 2,000 to 3,000 home computer users in the Bay Area, 500 had indicated interest.

It was early to be sure. Mainstream adoption of the PC was still a few years away and the Internet as we know it was still more than a decade in the future.

But the process should have given newspapers a rudimentary understanding of the power of digital distribution. History shows the sector was slow to react to the rise of the Internet. Now, surveys show much of the public prefers receiving news from Web-based sources over newspapers, and many of the country's most prestigious papers are in financial trouble. Some papers, including The Christian Science Monitor have stopped publishing some print editions.

"This is an experiment," said David Cole of the San Francisco Examiner in the TV report. "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. We're not in it to make money."

[terminalblue]

you know, its pretty amazing that they could do all that without using PDF's... but that just would have made it take 6 hours instead of two.

[dnewman20]

You forgot to mention the company that brought this about -- Compuserve.

[cincytee]

While this makes newspaper publishers appear to be sleeping at the wheel, it misses the key point: Newspapers' content has been delivered fairly successfully via the Internet for years now, but it doesn't generate enough revenue to support their operations. If these institutions are to survive -- and I mean as independent, skeptical, and public-minded operations with resources to combat entrenched or abusive power -- they simply must admit that their true product, information, is actually worth something and start charging for it, even (and especially) online. In the Bush administration, we saw the tip of the potential calamity when all newspapers can afford is to reprint official press releases. Are we going to repeat those mistakes when the Obama administration says, "Of *course* all that money is being spent properly!"

[James Anderson Merritt]

Not only did the newspapers have early warning evidence of the coming trend, but once things were much further along (1990s), many of us consumers actually made concrete suggestions to our local and regional newspapers to help them get ready for the changes ahead. The response was pretty much denial, and an ever-more-desperate clinging to the idea that they were in the "newsPAPER" business, rather than in the information collection and digestion business, with multiple distribution channels.

I guess what actually happened was that those who "got it" migrated to other jobs where they would be better poised to surf the coming wave, and may very well be leading today's "news business." Those who were in love with the newsPAPER product stayed put and are now reaping the harvest of their earlier decisions.

I am interested to see what the advent of digital paper/flexies will do to what is left of the newspaper industry, given that such technology contains the potential to resurrect newspapers as we might like to know them in the 21st century.

[SnowCrash8]

I used betas of Wash. Post Digital ink in mid-90's and other online experiements, and never again really subscribed to newspapers or magazines. Unfortunately, many of the traditional paper based outfits experimenting with online content failed to transition in a timely fashion, and now are feeling the effects. Of course online content is also a disagregator away from major news outlets too, and as has been pointed out, coming up with a revenue model that replaces what was has and is not happening.

[davidherron444]

Similarly the music industry was warned long long ago that since information wants to be free, digitizing their music could lead to rampant sharing of digitized music over the networks. Yet the music industry sat on their hands and released their digitized music using easily copyable technologies. Therefore the music is similarly culpable in their own similar demise for failure to adequately and properly use the internet.

[Maccess]

Imagine? I've been doing that for the last ten years.