Twenty-nine years ago this week, I started working full-time in a bureau office at a daily newspaper for the first time. I banged the keys on a heavy manual typewriter to type on newsprint that was fed into a machine transmitted over telephone lines.
It was revolutionary: No longer would anyone have to drive our copy the 30 miles to our main office.
Five years later, I joined an experimental division of our company called Gannett New Media. We were writing news that would reside on our computers – never printed on a press – until our customers dialed into our computer to download the information at 300 baud.
It was revolutionary: No longer would anyone have to rely on a physical delivery system to get their “newspaper.”
In the mid-1990s, my newspaper in Huntington, W.Va., began serious experimentation with delivering news via the Internet. We published, for example, our first live “game blog” from a Division I-AA national championship football game in 1996.
It, too, was revolutionary: We had readers from around the world and, for example, got e-mails from sailors aboard ships in Southeast Asia.
By then, we were already in the midst of a disruptive-technological event, but too few of us knew it. Some thought the Internet a mere fad. Part of the problem in my industry is that too many people are still trying to figure out whether the revolution is real or permanent, and either way, how to avoid being a part of it or, worse, how to impede it, at least passively
What we need to be doing is figuring out how and where great journalism – public service journalism – fits in, how to make it relevant to our digital readers, not lamenting its demise or protecting what used to be.
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