Comments on: Video: Web-like newspaper delivery in 1981

Newspaper publishers have no excuse for reacting slowly to the Web. Benefits of digital delivery were evident 28 years ago.

[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.