An oral history of the epic collision between journalism and digital technology, 1980 to the present

A project of the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy

Search results for “”

Chapter 5: Then Came Cable

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…

Chapter 2: America Goes Online

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 syr…

Chapter 13: The Advertising Rollercoaster

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 …

Chapter 4: The Original Sin

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…

Chapter 14: Going Social and Paying to Play

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. B…

Chapter 15: Time Will Tell

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.” A…

Chapter 3: The Big Bang

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 1…