5 Ways Newspapers Botched the Web 136
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.'"
Your daily newspaper by radio facsimile - in 1939 (Score:5, Informative)
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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 [antiqueradios.com]
[as published in Radio-Craft, March 1939]
Ah, Yes, Viewtron... (Score:4, Informative)
First off, it spoke NAPLPS [wikipedia.org] -- 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
Re:Paper and gasoline-based dinosaurs (Score:3, Informative)
Re:LA Times (Score:5, Informative)
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, [tribune.com] 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, [forbes.com] who is not from the newspaper business. He's the former CEO of DirecTV.
Re:Paper and gasoline-based dinosaurs (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Cue Cat anyone?? (Score:3, Informative)
How could they not mention Belo Corp (owner of the Dallas Morning News)$40 million dollar investment in the Cue Cat? The ultimate link between newspapers and web pages via bar codes in an adorable PS2 device.
http://www.dallasobserver.com/2001-06-28/news/goodbye-kitty/ [dallasobserver.com]
Re:Your daily newspaper by radio facsimile - in 19 (Score:3, Informative)
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It was 1989 all over again as well:
In two small Illinois towns, a one-page fax newspaper called Fax Today has challenged the local daily with some success, prompting predictions that similar fax papers could spread like a virus across the country and pose a threat to newspapers.
What makes Fax Today different is that it is free to subscribers and supported by advertising. It was started in 1989 in Effingham, Ill., by Jack M. Schultz, an entrepreneur with no newspaper experience. He expanded the service to Bloomington in 1990. The enterprise is profitable, Mr. Schultz said, and he sees significant potential for growth.
The last two years have seen a flurry of experiments in delivering news by fax. For instance, The Chicago Tribune, The Knoxville News-Sentinel in Tennessee and The Minneapolis Star Tribune abandoned fax papers that charged a subscription fee for a one-page afternoon update of business news.
The Los Angeles Times provides a free summary of news via fax to government officials and diplomats in Moscow as a promotional vehicle.
The New York Times has three fax news products aimed at areas where the newspaper is not readily available: a six-page fax newspaper for hotels in Japan, which emphasizes Japanese news; a six-page international edition for Australia and other foreign countries, and an eight-page edition for cruise ships. Small Fax Newspaper Shakes Up Its Press Rivals [nytimes.com] [August 12, 1991]
The RCA Radio Fax receiver is fascinating and provocative.
In 1939 for small print runs you cut a stencil for a mimeograph machine - the tech from hell - or you bought a letterpress out of the back pages of Popular Science.
The dry paper home fax machine that can deliver legible 7 pt. text and halftoned photographs is pure science fiction.
You might not want be able to justify a $260 radio fax machine for your home - but it's not hard to see what it brings to the Chris-Craft cabin cruiser or the branch office.
30 miles at 30 MHz. 100 watts. Perhaps ten times that range at lower frequencies and higher power. The thing ran off a clock. There were no external controls whatever.
That alone had to be an eye-opener for the shortwave hobbyist.
Re:Irony (Score:3, Informative)
In my area our local paper got bought by a big corp. and they slashed the local reporters and just brought in content from other "assets" they owned. Readership dropped like a rock. The same trend has been followed in hundreds of markets and the results are the same. More of the failings in newspapers could be blamed on the significant drop in quality in the last decade then the web. I know this because several print weeklies that focus only on local news have been popping up, in a time when these are supposed to be dying because the value of news is what drives the market, not the medium. There has been a showing of individual Bloggers, but they can't do the reporting, they need the pooled resources of a news room.
Re:Paper and gasoline-based dinosaurs (Score:3, Informative)