This is an example page. It’s different from a blog post because it will stay in one place and will show up in your site navigation (in most themes). Most people start with an About page that introduces them to potential site visitors. It might say s…
… …
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung shows off its videotex system in Berlin, 1983. (AP/Elke Bruhn-Hoffmann) In the beginning, there was print. And then there was the telegraph, which enabled news “wires,” and then radio, followed not too far behind by tel…
… …
… …
… …
Options on Yahoo stock start trading at the Chicago Board Options Exchange, 1997. (AP/Charles Bennett) Around this same time, Mike Moritz, a former Time magazine reporter who had become a venture investor at Sequoia Capital, encountered two Stanford …
The Wall Street Journal’s Gordon Crovitz discusses the newspaper’s redesign in 2006. (Ramin Talaie/Bloomberg via Getty) While all these new entrants had entered the online information era, the newspapers weren’t sleeping through it. By the early ’90s…
Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, in 1995. (AP/Stephan Savoia) While AOL was getting everyone comfortable online in the early ’90s, a computer scientist named Tim Berners-Lee had been working at CERN, near Geneva, Switzerland, since 19…
Ted Turner speaks at a CNN banquet in 1995 (AP/John Bazemore) Even before Yahoo unleashed the floodgates of free news, in Atlanta, at Ted Turner’s CNN, people on both the business side and the journalistic side were intrigued with the idea of taking …
Microsoft’s Bill Gates and AOL’s Steve Case announce a deal, 1996. (AP/Lacy Atkins) In watching the video pitches for the early teletext, or videotex, services, it’s easy to be amused by their Paleolithic production values: the clunky fonts, the syru…
Clay Christensen, 2011. (CC/Betsy Weber) The failure to embrace engineering is, in some ways, merely a symptom of the larger issue that faced virtually all legacy media players of substantial size over the past three decades: The Innovator’s Dilemma,…
Bloggers write at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, where some were credentialed as a new kind of press. (Mario Tama/Getty) As we’ve seen, traditional news companies approached the web in one of two ways. Companies that were producing articles…
Traders watch AOL Time Warner’s stock price dive after a management shakeup in 2002. (AP/M. Spencer Green) Because of their first-mover advantages and considerable investments, the big four — AOL, Yahoo, CNN.com, and MSNBC.com — were all well on thei…
Craigslist CEO Jim Buckmaster and founder Craig Newmark, 2005. (AP/Jeff Chiu) To many, the big question here is: What really happened to the news business? Maybe this is the simplest answer: Somewhere along the way, the advertising business left it i…
Mark Zuckerberg at Facebook headquarters, 2007. (AP/Paul Sakuma) Global advertising crashed — along with everything else — in the 2008 financial collapse. Total media advertising dropped from $410.6 billion in 2008 to $365.3 billion the next year. Bu…
The third generation of Apple’s iPad, announced in March 2012. (AP/Paul Sakuma) When we began constructing this oral history so many words ago, we raised some big questions that we hoped to answer about “what really happened to the news business.” At…
… …
… …
… …
… General comments on the project? Problems with our transcripts? Anything else on the site that needs correcting? Leave a comment here. (Leave comments on our essay on individual chapters.) …
Tim Armstrong: Matthew Hurst; Marty Baron: Essdras M. Suarez/Boston Globe; John Battelle: James Duncan Davidson/O’Reilly Media; Tim Berners-Lee: Campus Party Brasil; Krishna Bharat: Miriam Olsson Jeffrey; Henry Blodget: Hubert Burda Media; David Brad…
When we created Riptide as Fellows at Harvard Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center, we wanted to find out “what really happened” between the moment online services were first introduced into journalistic institutions in the late 1970s to today, 35 yea…
When we embarked on the exploration that became Riptide, John, Martin, and I knew that how the news gets paid for and the evolving need for readers to pay for the news they consume would be a central theme. Even as we asked a few early readers to com…
Even before releasing Riptide we heard from a number of people who felt that we missed particular players in the evolution of digital news. We explain in Riptide’s “About” section that we did our best to cover a lot of ground in only three months, th…