AI summaries are destroying the news business

Generative artificial intelligence is pushing the news business to the breaking point. AI summaries from the likes of Google, Microsoft, OpenAI and others are diverting revenue from news publishers, leading to fewer click-throughs, less advertising revenue and fewer subscriptions.
Staffers at Microsoft and OpenAI knew that scraping news websites to train their AI models could damage or even destroy those publications, according to court documents in a high-profile copyright infringement lawsuit filed by the New York Times. (See articles below.)
An OpenAI executive referred to an “existential threat” to publishers and a Microsoft executive said AI content scraping had started a “doom loop” for the news business, according to reports this week.
From a consumer perspective, the AI summaries are enticing. They give users the answers they are looking for instead of weblinks to full articles to read. Also, many publications have pay walls that provide friction for the casual web surfer but that AI systems have managed to bypass.
AI model builders must coordinate with news publishers and compensate them for their work. Otherwise, they could end up killing the valuable sources of information that they rely on for their answer engines.

Related articles:

Tech Companies’ Staff Knew Their AI Tools Posed ‘Existential Threat’ to Publishers (The Wall Street Journal; Sept. 17, 2026)

Microsoft and OpenAI Workers Worry About ‘Largest Theft of Labor’ in History (The New York Times; Sept. 17, 2026)

OpenAI, Microsoft executives' quotes on AI training threaten copyright defense, news outlets argue (Reuters; Sept. 17, 2026)

Google rolls out pay-per-value AI licensing program to publishers (Digiday; Sept. 14, 2026)

Ziff Davis CEO: if OpenAI can find $750 billion for data centers, it can find money for publishers, too (Fortune; Sept. 14, 2026)

Photo: AI artwork produced with prompts on Google Gemini.

Newspapers I used to work for and what’s become of them

My professional career has been in two parts. The first was after I earned a bachelor’s degree in journalism from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and worked for daily newspapers. The second was after I earned a master’s degree in journalism from Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, and then worked for trade and business media.
I don’t include the first part of my career on my LinkedIn profile. It was fun, educational and helped hone my stills in reporting, writing and editing, but it really doesn’t pertain to my current focus.
But lately I’ve been thinking about those print media days. I still have boxes of “clips” of articles from those years. I’ll probably just end up throwing them away at some point.
What spurred my nostalgia was recent headlines. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution just stopped printing a paper newspaper after 157 years and the Washington Post is slashing its staff amid a shrinking business.
It’s a tough time for print journalism after decades of business erosion due to the internet.
As an undergraduate student at U of I in the early 1980s, I worked at the Daily Illini student newspaper, which then published five days a week. Apparently it now only prints a weekly edition, called The DI, on Wednesday and is mostly focused on online news, which makes sense.
After college, I worked for the Small Newspaper Group, owned by the Small family out of Kankakee, Ill. I started at the Streator Times-Press in central Illinois. I worked there for two years (1984-86) before moving to the Daily Dispatch in Moline, Ill., and shortly thereafter the Rock Island Argus.
The Streator newspaper merged with its bigger sister newspaper in Ottawa, Ill., to serve the greater LaSalle County, Illinois, area, in September 2005.
In March 2018, Shaw Media bought the combined newspaper. (See articles by the AP, Streator Chamber of Commerce, and Dirks, Van Essen & Murray.)
I have fond memories of working in Streator, an industrial and farming community. One large factory there made glass bottles. There was a bar across the street for workers that I would go to. The bartenders would pour beer from bottles, which they would toss in a chute on the wall behind them. The bottles would smash as they fell into a container on the other side, presumably to be recycled to make new beer bottles.
When I moved to the Quad Cities to work for the Daily Dispatch and Rock Island Argus (1986-92), I lived in East Moline, Ill.
An industrial Midwest hub located on the Mississippi River dividing Illinois and Iowa, the Quad Cities are made up of Davenport and Bettendorf, Iowa, and Moline and Rock Island, Illinois. There are lots of great parks and restaurants there and it is home to agriculture giant John Deere.
The two sister newspapers eventually merged operations. And in June 2017, Lee Enterprises, publisher of the rival Quad-City Times in Davenport, bought out its cross-river competition from the Small family. (See articles by Our QC News, the Quad-City Times, KWQC and Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.)

Photos: My profile of Jim’s Rib Haven from the April 28, 1991, edition of the Rock Island Argus. I was saddened to hear that Jim’s Rib Haven has since closed.

AI summaries are the latest existential threat for news publishers

When I was studying for a print journalism degree in the mid-1980s, newspapers were already in decline. It didn’t deter me from that line of work but it was worrisome.
At the time, broadcast and cable television news were lessening demand for newspapers, especially in major metropolitan areas. It turned out to be one of a series of crises to face the news industry over the years.
When I graduated from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, in 1984, PCs weren’t yet commonplace. The early days of the internet with AOL, Yahoo and the like would create the next crisis for newspapers. But publishers adapted and shifted their operations to the web. And as the internet evolved, they learned how to attract readers and game the Google algorithm using search engine optimization. At the same time, advertising shifted to the web.
The immediacy of the web has great advantages over the dead-tree editions of the news. I imagine that as more Baby Boomers die off so will the newspapers they grew up with.
But now digital publications, including legacy newspapers, are facing their next existential threat from generative artificial intelligence. Google searches now generate AI summaries of news and information requests. And that has led to fewer clicks on weblinks back to the source of the news and information. The result is fewer readers, less advertising revenue and fewer opportunities to sell subscription services.
One recent study found that U.K. publishers are seeing click-through rates cut by nearly 50% because of AI summaries.
Google disputes the results, calling the study inaccurate and based on flawed assumptions, according to Press Gazette.
Still, publishers in the U.S. and elsewhere are seeing a decline in traffic. Many readers might get all the information they’re looking for on a subject from an AI summary.
This has led to a corresponding loss in advertising revenue. News publishers have responded by cutting journalism jobs. The Press Gazette has been tracking the layoffs.
Some publishers are demanding payment for use of their content to create AI summaries. But that would probably only help the largest news companies that have the legal resources to fight Big Tech.
AI summaries will need to do a better job of sourcing in their responses to encourage a click-through for more information.
Online publishers already are preparing for a day called “Google Zero,” when Google stops sending traffic to websites.

Related articles:

Google users are less likely to click on links when an AI summary appears in the results (Pew Research; July 22, 2025)

News Sites Are Getting Crushed by Google’s New AI Tools (The Wall Street Journal; June 10, 2025)

Google search algorithm changes hurting small publishers (Tech-media-tainment; March 1, 2025)

Photo: Online news illustration (Mike Licht via Creative Commons)

Old newspapers need to be digitized

I recently tried to locate a newspaper article from the 1970s the old fashioned way – in a public library on microfilm. I was unsuccessful in my hunt.
The process was laborious and I eventually gave up after looking through several years’ worth of weekly newspaper issues.
I was trying to find an article that I had only a vague recollection about. When I was growing up in Libertyville, Illinois, a local newspaper did an article on my mother and her experiences raising seven children. The article by the Independent-Register newspaper was published sometime between 1972 and 1980.
The newspaper is no longer in operation. All that’s left are decades of print issues on spools of microfilm.
But trying to find an article with the broad time period that I had is extremely difficult. I even narrowed my search to around Mother’s Day for those years, figuring that was the reason the article was written. But I came up empty. I began to question whether the article even existed and somehow my memory was faulty. After all, I was in junior high or high school at the time.
If the newspaper had been digitized, the search could have been done in seconds. But who’s going to digitize some old suburban newspaper from microfilm? These publications are basically orphan works now.
Maybe one day, the cost for digitizing publications on microfilm will come down and some historical society will do the job. But they should do it before something happens to the microfilm libraries, otherwise the information within will be lost to the ages.

Photo: A publication on microfilm. (Microfilm Imaging Systems)

Covid-19 coronavirus pandemic likely a business killer

The Covid-19 coronavirus pandemic has been deadly for thousands of people, but it also likely will kill many businesses.
Government orders have closed movie theaters, bars, restaurants, sports and entertainment venues as well as retail stores deemed non-essential. Millions of workers have lost their jobs as a result.
VIP Cinema Holdings, which makes reclining seats for movie theaters, is shutting down for good after economic fallout from the coronavirus pandemic made a proposed restructuring impossible, the Wall Street Journal reported March 30.
Media companies that rely on advertising have been hammered as companies pull back on ad spending.
BuzzFeed News described the Covid-19 pandemic as “a media extinction event.” The report said the decline in advertising revenue will see a spate of newspaper closures.
And many technology startups have seen business and funding dry up amid the crisis, which has rocked Wall Street and likely has pushed the U.S. into recession. Like the dot-com crash of 2000, only the strong will survive. Large tech firms will pick up intellectual property and engineering talent on the cheap during the downturn ahead.
Last week, satellite internet startup OneWeb filed for bankruptcy protection and cut most of its staff, after failing to secure new funding from investors including its biggest backer SoftBank. OneWeb, which previously had raised $3.4 billion, said it would seek a sale after filing for Chapter 11 relief, the Financial Times reported.
North, a maker of augmented-reality glasses that counts Intel and Amazon.com as investors, is looking for a buyer as it runs low on cash, Bloomberg reported. Rival AR headset maker Magic Leap also is looking for a buyer, it said.
E-scooter rental startup Bird last week laid off about 30% of its employees amid uncertainty caused by the Covid-19 pandemic, TechCrunch reported. Rival Lime also is struggling, it said.
Driverless truck startup Starsky Robotics this month announced that it is shutting down and selling off its assets.
Among technology services I use, I worry that photo-hosting site Flickr might go under.
In December, the chief executive of Flickr owner SmugMug sent an email to users warning that the business was losing money and needed a boost in paying subscribers, the Verge reported.
“Flickr — the world’s most-beloved, money-losing business — still needs your help,” CEO Don MacAskill said. “We cannot continue to operate it at a loss as we’ve been doing.”
Things are probably even worse for Flickr today.

Photo: Covid-19 coronavirus. (AJC1 via Creative Commons)

President Trump depicted as clown, baby, bully and Putin pawn on latest covers

Magazine publishers have been busy recently trashing U.S. President Donald Trump for his oddly close relationship with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Magazine covers have morphed Trump with Putin or showed Putin as in control over Trump.
Time magazine created a digital composite of Trump and Putin for its July 30 cover. New York magazine identified the two as Prump-Tutin on its July 9-22 cover.
New Statesman and The Week showed Putin firmly in control of Trump following their Helsinki summit. The New Yorker depicted Trump literally falling flat on his face with its July 30 cover illustration.
What follows are the latest Trump magazine covers, plus a bonus cover from the New York Daily News newspaper.

Related articles: 

Trump depicted as king, wrecking ball swinger on latest magazine covers (June 20, 2018)

President Trump incites Europe, Iran on latest magazine covers (May 20, 2018)

President Trump depicted as pig, naked on latest magazine covers (April 14, 2018)

President Trump depicted as glutton, grenade and captain of sinking ship on latest magazine covers (March 10, 2018)

President Trump depicted as crying baby, nutjob, Neanderthal on latest magazine covers (Jan. 19, 2018)

Donald Trump magazine covers: How the news media treat our 45th president (Dec. 30, 2018)

Trump depicted as king, wrecking ball swinger on latest magazine covers

Magazines Time and The Week depicted President Donald Trump as a king on recent covers after Trump claimed he was above the law in regards to the investigation into possible Russian collusion in the 2016 election.
The Economist and The Spectator illustrated Trump wrecking America’s foreign policy and NATO, respectively, in covers this month.
Other magazine covers referred to Trump’s historic meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.
I don’t usually include newspapers in my regular roundups of Trump magazine covers, but the New York Post’s cover of Trump meeting with Kim Kardashian West was too good to pass up.

Ancestry.com, Cover Stories, Will Robots Take My Job? and other interesting websites

In nine years of blogging, I’ve called attention to 300 websites that I found interesting, informative and entertaining. What follows are some more sites worth noting.

Ancestry.com

Ancestry.com is the world’s premiere online genealogy service, hosting a massive collection of historical records, documents and family trees.
I’ve been a subscriber for many years and should have included it on my list of favorite websites long ago.
Ancestry.com has more than 2.7 million subscribers who have access to 20 billion records from 80 countries, as well as 90 million family trees.
The Lehi, Utah-based company also sells AncestryDNA genetic testing kits that can tell you where your ancestors were from. The kit is now available for $79 for the holiday season, $20 off the regular price.

CalendarHome

CalendarHome.com lets you print out calendars for free.
I like to print out monthly calendars for planning purposes. CalendarHome.com is a simple but valuable resource. It was created in 1997 by Justin White.

Cover Stories

I love magazines and like tracking noteworthy magazine covers. I’ve previously mentioned Cover Junkie as a great resource. Another is Cover Stories.
Cover Stories, formerly MagLove, is a regular column on MarkLives.com by designer, writer and artist Shane de Lange of Cape Town, South Africa. Cover Stories deconstructs magazine cover designs, both past and present, and highlights the week’s best covers.
In addition to the column, Cover Stories is on Pinterest.

Will Robots Take My Job?

Advances in automation, computerization and robotics are taking their toll on the human workforce.
The website Will Robots Take My Job? answers that question as a percentage of likelihood. (See article by Business Insider.)

Car logos and car company logos worldwide

Recently I saw a truck with a logo that I didn’t recognize. Thanks to the niche website Car-Logos.org, I was able to find an answer: It was a truck built by Chinese automaker Great Wall Motors.

Movie Heds

Movie Heds is a Twitter account that curates newspaper headlines from fictional movies. The novelty Twitter account is the work of Travis Greenwood of Portland, Oregon.
(See articles by AV Club and Laughing Squid.)

Jody Draws

I’m a fan of the artwork of Jody Nilson. She likes to illustrate pop culture subjects like actors and actresses from shows like “Game of Thrones” and “The Walking Dead.” (Check out her work at JodyDraws.com.)
She first came to my attention sketching illustrations on the back of Netflix envelopes and posting them on Twitter.

Scientwehst

I’ve written several times about artists who dare to mix the worlds of art and pornography. (See “The intersection of art and porn” and “Porn-inspired art.”)
The latest example is a New York City-based artist named Giulia, aka Scientwehst on Instagram. She creates “brazenly-feminine digital collages.” Giulia likes to overlay images of modern architecture on pictures of the female body.
Giulia especially likes to superimpose church interiors and exteriors on naked women in erotic poses. These photo collages are seen as sacrilegious by some.
(See articles by Maxim, Office magazine and Highsnobiety.)

Hot journalism job: Engagement editor

Newspapers and other online news media are desperate to increase their traffic and boost their active readers. They are following the same path as Tronc in treating journalism as pieces of content that can be funneled into social media and distribution services.
A hot journalism buzzword is “engagement.” Not couples planning to get married, but readers finding articles that they want to share and interact with through likes, retweets and posting comments. Engagement also means keeping readers longer on your website and giving them more content (and advertising) to consume.
A quick search of LinkedIn reveals an explosion of news media sites hiring “engagement editors.” More than 600 websites have hired engagement editors, most within the last year or so.
News media sites with engagement editors include GQ, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, NPR, Bloomberg, Vox Media, Recode, the Verge and the Huffington Post, to name a few. Many outlets have more than one engagement editor.
Another job title that seems to be fast growing among media outlets is “chief digital officer.”

Related reading:

New Journalism Buzzwords (Medium; April 22, 2014)

Photo: Engagement photo by Brandon Atkinson.

The Failed Promise of Digital Content: A roundup of concerns

The dawn of the internet promised many things including a vast library of always available content. But as the years have passed, that utopia has not emerged.
Link rot, copyright squabbles and other issues have created an incomplete, unreliable content library online.
I’ve documented a lot of these problems in my long-running series, “The Failed Promise of Digital Content.” What follows is a roundup of articles on various subjects having to do with that broader topic. Hopefully they won’t disappear any time soon.

Link rot and disappearing content

How an Archive of the Internet Could Change History (The New York Times Magazine; June 21, 2016)

Raiders of the Lost Web: If a Pulitzer-finalist 34-part series of investigative journalism can vanish from the web, anything can. (The Atlantic; Oct. 14, 2015)

Maybe The Best Place To Store Your Favorite Photos Is On Old-Fashioned Paper (The Huffington Post; April 30, 2015)

Amber, a new tool to prevent linkrot on websites, is out in beta (NiemanLab; Feb. 4, 2015)

Never trust a corporation to do a library’s job (The Message; Jan. 28, 2015)

Missing content

Copyright Terms And How Historical Journalism Is Disappearing (Techdirt; Nov. 4, 2015)

Too many classic films remain buried in studios’ vaults (Los Angeles Times; Oct. 23, 2015)

False information online

How fake news sites frequently trick big-time journalists (Columbia Journalism Review; May 26, 2016)

Unreadable digital formats

How the father of the internet is trying to make the web last forever (Business Insider; June 20, 2016)

Threatened business models

Google’s Arbitrary Morality Police Threaten Us Yet Again; Media Sites Probably Shouldn’t Use Google Ads (Techdirt; June 15, 2016)

Photo: Abandoned and rotting boat on the estuary floor at Llandanwg, Wales. (Photo by William Warby)

10 commonplace things that are disappearing

A year ago, I wrote about “10 things doomed to go the way of the dinosaur.”
That list included pennies, business cards, phone books, newspapers and the U.S. Postal Service, among other things.
As I said at the time, some of these things will be stubbornly persistent but the future is clear. It may take many years, but they are destined to fade away. Seriously, why does the U.S. still have pennies and phone books?
Comedian John Oliver joined the movement to eliminate the penny in a funny segment on his HBO show “Last Week Tonight” in November.
What follows is a list of 10 commonplace things that are disappearing.

1. Music CDs

Rapper Kanye West recently announced that he no longer plans to put out music on CDs.
Music sales on physical media, including CDs, have been on a long decline. First, digital downloads (Apple iTunes) took a bite out of physical media sales. Now streaming services (Spotify, Apple Music, etc.) are causing declines in both physical media and digital downloads.
You need look no further than the shrinking CD section at Best Buy stores to see what’s happening to music sales.

2. Autographs

Years ago when people met a celebrity, they’d want to get his or her autograph. Today, selfies are the memento of choice.
Singer Taylor Swift noted in 2014 that autographs became “obsolete” after Apple came out with the first iPhone with a front-facing camera. That was the iPhone 4, released in June 2010.

3. Journalism schools

The declining newspaper industry and resulting job losses have spurred many universities to morph their journalism schools into media and marketing schools. Some universities (such as Emory and the University of Colorado) have dropped their journalism programs.

4. Alarm clocks

In the smartphone age, who needs an alarm clock anymore? It’s certainly a heck of a lot easier to set an alarm on a smartphone than a clock radio.
Smartphones also have replaced separate cameras, GPS navigation devices and other gadgets.

5. Cursive handwriting

Kids aren’t taught cursive handwriting in school anymore. So they have a tough time reading cards and letters sent by their grandparents. Typing is much more important. About the only thing they’ll write in cursive is their signature.

6. Postcards

Postcards are fading away along with letters sent via the U.S. Postal Service. Why send a postcard on vacation when you can instantly send a photo via text or post it on social media?
Meanwhile, the U.S. Postal Service continues to decline in relevance. (See “The Postal Service Is Delivering Itself Into Bankruptcy, Audit Shows.”)

7. Payphones

The rise of cellphones has done away with the need for payphones and phone booths. New York City is replacing phone booths with free Wi-Fi stations and information kiosks.

8. Appointment books

I’m stubbornly holding on to my weekly at-a-glance schedule book. But a lot of people have switched to online schedules using Microsoft Outlook and other programs. I just like using paper schedule books for writing work and personal notes and appointments. But the tide has clearly turned in favor of electronic calendars.

9. TV Guide magazine

How is TV Guide magazine still around? TV Guide was created at a time when television shows were scheduled. In the on-demand video streaming world, you don’t need a grid schedule of what’s on. Also, with program information available online, a weekly printed magazine seems archaic.

10. Keys

Many cars already have replaced keys with keyless ignition systems. These wireless push-to-start systems use small battery-powered fobs you can leave in your pocket. Smartphones with near-field communication (NFC) technology are starting to replace hotel room keys and cards and could one day be used with cars and home door locks as well.

Photo: Music compact discs. (Photo by Flickr user m01229)

Journalists my age learned to write on typewriters

Journalism memory lane: Part 1 

When I was in journalism school at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign, we didn’t have personal computers. We used typewriters.
That was 1982-84 in what was then called the College of Communications. (The university changed the name in 2008 to the College of Media.) The school offered degrees in print journalism, broadcast journalism and advertising. My bachelor’s degree is in print journalism.
There were computers on campus, but they were big IBM mainframes in which you had to feed paper punch cards. Students had to sign up for time to use them and they were mostly for engineering and business students. I never used them.
The university also had a ground-breaking networked computer system called Plato.
But let’s get back to my low-tech journalism writing courses.
We typed our articles for class on 8 ½-by-11 sheets of paper on typewriters and used copy-editing markup symbols to make corrections.
To write term papers for my classes, I often used the Atex computer system at the college newspaper, the Daily Illini. I’d print the assignments out on a dot-matrix printer that was fed perforated paper. My assignments would come out in one long strip and I’d have to tear off each sheet at the perforations before handing them in.
Our graphics class had a pagination machine for printing out camera-ready copy. You’d type in your text, along with codes for font styles, sizes and column widths. The machine would print out headlines and body copy suitable for physical cut-and-paste layout.
Columns of text and headlines had to be cut by hand with a small blade on a plastic board for positioning on a layout sheet. Text, photos and graphics would be run through a roller that would apply hot wax to the back. Then you’d paste it on a blank newspaper grid to assemble the page. When finished these page designs would be photographed and etched onto printing plates.
This was before personal computers and desktop publishing software. Now, all layout and design is done on the computer screen.
The paste-up method of newspaper design was used for about a decade after I graduated.
I learned photojournalism at the University of Illinois the old fashioned way as well, with 35 mm film cameras and chemical baths for developing negatives and prints. There were dark rooms with special gear for projecting light through negatives onto photo-sensitive paper. It was a delicate and time-consuming way to make photos.
Newspapers were still a healthy business in the mid-1980s, although they had been on a slow, steady decline.
The biggest change in the industry while I was in college was the launch of USA Today in September 1982. It revolutionized how newspapers looked. Newspapers across the country copied USA Today’s style, including its generous use of color photos and graphics, informative charts, and short stories that didn’t jump to inside pages.
Newspaper journalists at the time derided USA Today as McPaper. They said it dumbed down journalism by reducing long-form articles to infographics and bite-sized stories.
The transition to PCs would be the next big change. But that wouldn’t come for another decade for most newspapers.

Part 2: Before there were PCs at newspapers, there was Atex.

Photos: IBM Selectric typewriter (photo by Flicker user Tomislav Medak); front page of first issue of USA Today on Sept. 15, 1982. 

Before there were PCs at newspapers, there was Atex

Journalism memory lane: Part 2 

After graduating from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign with a bachelor’s degree in journalism in 1984, I worked for eight years for the Small Newspaper Group at papers in Streator, Moline and Rock Island, Illinois.
Like many newspapers at the time, they used the Atex computer system of servers and thin-client computers.
We had green-screen terminals at our desks to write our articles, which were stored in another room on a central computer.

To create a story in the system, you’d fill out the fields at the top of the screen, including byline and “slug” or name for the article.
The Atex system generally performed pretty well, but occasionally your terminal would crash and you’d lose all of your work since you last saved it. Writers were encouraged to manually save their work by entering a “save” command. But this was back of mind on deadline sometimes. I can remember having to start from scratch after losing nearly complete stories that I hadn’t saved. Talk about stressful.
In the mid to late 1980s and early 1990s (before the Internet and the widespread adoption of PCs), research for news articles was a lot more time intensive. Courthouses, for instance, only had paper records and handwritten docket books. Searching for criminal files and lawsuits was a manual process.
Even newspapers’ own libraries were antiquated. Articles were clipped and filed by subject. Reporters had to call staff librarians to dig up old articles in the “morgue.”
Writers were encouraged to keep their own files, including clipped articles, to save time on deadline. Of course, maintaining these records was a great time suck too. I used to spend my weekends getting organized.

When filing stories from the road in the late 1980s, I used a company-owned Radio Shack TRS-80 portable computer. It was popular with journalists because it was study and reliable. Reporters affectionately referred to the machines as Trash-80s.
The TRS-80 featured a tiny monochromatic screen on which you could view a few lines of text at a time.
You could file a story electronically by attaching acoustic couplers to the ear and mouth pieces of a standard phone and dialing into your company’s computer system. There was no Internet to route files at the time.
Since cell phones weren’t around, reporters had to use pay phones or another landline to check back to the office, dictate stories or file electronically.

Part 3: Early notebook PCs and America Online: The start of modern journalism.

Photos: A Winston-Salem Journal reporter enters her story into an Atex Systems terminal in 1981 (top); the glowing green screen of an Atex terminal (photo by Flickr user Lowell B); Radio Shack TRS-80 model 100 portable computer (photo from Photoree); TRS-80 with acoustic couplers (photo from Fast Horse).

Early notebook PCs and America Online: The start of modern journalism

Journalism memory lane: Part 3 

When I reentered the workforce in 1992, after taking a one-year break for graduate school, personal computers were being rolled out broadly in the publishing industry.
Smaller publications seemed to be first to make the plunge into PCs and desktop publishing. Bigger periodicals had large investments in systems like Atex and learning an entirely new method of publishing would be a major disruption to operations.
But the change was inevitable. Desktop publishing with PCs meant that publications could get rid of paste-up workers. Everything would be done digitally. PCs were more efficient and capable than the systems they replaced.
In the early 1990s, the battle between Apple Macintosh computers and Microsoft Windows-based computers was still raging. Art departments at newspapers preferred Macs. Editorial departments sided with Windows machines.
The first computer I ever purchased was an Apple Macintosh PowerBook 180. The gray laptop had a 16-level grayscale display, 33 MHz microprocessor and 4 MB of RAM. With an internal fax modem and ClarisWorks software, the purchase set me back $2,145.
Before that, I had a Magnavox all-in-one word processor and printer.

It was a big deal when software was developed to share computer floppy disks between Mac and Windows machines. That way you could transfer text files from a Windows PC at work and read it on a Mac at home. Compatibility issues were a serious problem.
The next big shift in journalism was the arrival of Internet communications services. Early online services of prominence were America Online, CompuServe and Prodigy. Initially they took a walled garden approach to delivering the Internet to customers. They wanted customers to stay within their news and e-mail services. The floodgates to the open World Wide Web didn’t occur until the Netscape browser appeared on the scene in mid-1990s.
In the early days of the commercial Internet, I used mostly AOL and CompuServe. They were dial-up services and they were painfully slow.
When traveling you had to find local access numbers to dial into or pay long-distance toll charges. AOL and CompuServe had international access numbers too. But when those numbers were busy or unavailable, I would occasionally have to call long distance back to the States to file a story electronically.
Today we take for granted how easy it is to get the Internet on notebook computers.
Public Wi-Fi hotspots didn’t start showing up until after 2000.
In the days before Wi-Fi, you had to make sure you had a dial-up modem for your notebook PC. And you had to find a landline phone where you could unplug the phone cable from the wall or the phone itself to plug into your laptop. Then you had to configure the system to dial the Internet access number. That meant having to dial a 9 to get an outside line from a hotel or business and a 1 for long distance in the U.S. You had to manually type in those instructions to the configuration software. Sometimes it was trial and error to get it to work. It was a royal pain in the butt.
And Windows notebook computers weren’t very reliable back then. I had a number of company-owned notebooks die on me.
I especially remember a Texas Instruments brand laptop that failed on a trip to Hong Kong. I made the mistake of picking up the notebook with one hand from the corner of the machine. I felt the plastic chassis bend and heard the motherboard inside crack. And that was the end of that PC.
Today notebook chasses are super sturdy.

Part 4: Journalism at the dawn of the digital age.

Photos: Apple Macintosh PowerBook 180c laptop (photo from Wikipedia Creative Commons); Magnavox VideoWriter Word Processor (photo from Click Americana.)

Journalism at the dawn of the digital age

Journalism memory lane: Part 4

Personal computers, the World Wide Web, e-mail, cell phones, digital cameras, digital voice recorders and other tech advancements make things so much easier for journalists today. At the same time, now everyone has access to the same tools and can play journalist. (Hence the rise of bloggers and citizen journalists.)
Simple things like finding information on publicly traded companies or even corporate contact information used to be a chore. I remember poring over paper files at the Securities and Exchange Commission office in Washington, D.C. With the Web, there’s no need to leave the office for that any more.
Reporters used to spend a lot more time on the phone checking facts that now can be easily verified online.
Reporters also used to have a lot more paper clutter on their desks – files and documents they needed to research and write articles. Now that clutter has become digital – documents stored on PCs, bookmarks in Web browsers, and data in the Internet cloud.
The arrival of always-on, high-speed broadband Internet connections in the mid-1990s was a big deal. Getting a T-1 line at the office was a major coup for your workplace. Of course, now T-1 speeds are pokey.
My first e-mail account was through Rocketmail, which was purchased by Yahoo in 1997. I later abandoned it after it became inundated with spam e-mails. Today I use Web-based e-mail accounts from Yahoo and Google.
Old habits die hard and it took me a long time to switch from microcassette audio recorders to digital audio recorders for interviews. That switch happened maybe six years ago. I got sick of dealing with piles of microcassette tapes.
Other things that have gone bye-bye over the years include newspaper clips (why bother when your articles are searchable online?), Rolodexes and business card holders (LinkedIn and web searches have replaced those).
My first cell phone was a Motorola bag phone around 1990 that I used only in my car for “emergencies.” Voice minutes were expensive then. I didn’t use it for work. Using a cell phone for work didn’t happen for another 10 years or so.
Technology, like PCs, the Internet and mobile phones, has made journalists much more productive. But the news cycle has gone 24/7 and we’re always reachable.

Photo: Sony microcassette recorder (top); Rolodex business card file. 

10 things doomed to go the way of the dinosaur

1. The U.S. Postal Service

The independent government agency will be in a period of decline for years to come, but the future is clear. The U.S. Postal Service as we know it will gradually fade away. And along with it, so will go postcards, the hobby of stamp collecting, disgruntled postal workers with a gun fetish, and other things.
(See “Mail boxes, stamp collecting threatened by Post Office demise.”)

2. Pennies

Americans finally are wising up to the fact that pennies are unnecessary and wasteful. One-cent coins cost 2 cents to manufacture, creating a money losing-proposition for the U.S. government. They also are a drag on productivity and a hazard to children and pets if swallowed. Plus, they are becoming irrelevant as financial transactions increasingly switch to electronic payment options.
(See “Time is running out for the U.S. penny.”)

3. One-dollar bills

The issue of eliminating the $1 bill from U.S. currency in favor of $1 coins comes up every few years. Old coots clinging to the past have saved the paper bill for now. But eventually the federal government will do the right thing and ax the $1 bill. Doing so could save taxpayers $4.4 billion over the next 30 years.
(See “U.S. needs to stop printing $1 bills.”)

4. Business cards

Business cards are being replaced by LinkedIn. The personal information on business cards can quickly become out of date. People change jobs, job titles, mailing addresses, phone numbers and email accounts. The beauty of LinkedIn is that the user keeps his or her contact information and career data current themselves. Business cards are joining Rolodexes in the dust bin.
(See “Business cards becoming passe, replaced by LinkedIn.”)

5. Phone books

The clock is ticking for phone books. Most people today get phone numbers for businesses, government agencies and persons by searching the Internet. But there’s still money to be made selling advertising for yellow page directories, so phone books persist. But not for long.
(See “Phone books deserve to die.”)

6. Newspapers

Newspapers in print form are fading fast as more people get their news online. Some pundits are predicting that newspapers in the U.S. will start disappear en masse within a few years as circulation declines and production costs increase.
(See “The end of newspapers threatens paperboys and kidnapper props.”)

7. Magazines

Like newspapers, print magazines are declining in circulation, because of the rise of the Internet. Print magazines are likely to become a niche media as opposed to a mass media in the years to come. The cachet of being a magazine’s cover subject or cover model probably will diminish as well.
(See “Magazine sales continue to slide; Format’s future in doubt.”)

8. Copy editors

To save money, many publishers have cut the ranks of copy editors and fact checkers. The results have been a lot of Internet LOLs as the public shares the latest typos, misspellings and other embarrassing errors copy editors presumably would have caught.
(See “Copy editors are an expense some publishers don’t want.”)

9. Ownership of music, movies, other software

First it was physical media (CDs, DVDs, etc.) that were threatened by the shift to digital, now it’s ownership of entertainment and software. Consumers are shifting from owning digital media files to using subscription and ad-supported streaming media services. Plus, people are beginning to subscribe to PC software instead of owning it outright.
(See “Ownership of music, movies and software slipping away.”)

10. Concert and sports tickets as memorabilia and collectables

As more ticket sellers switch to electronic tickets that can be printed at home or scanned from a mobile device, collecting concert and sports tickets as mementos is likely to wane. A cheap printed ticket doesn’t have the same allure as a glossy, souvenir ticket. Plus, since they can be easily copied, they have no collector value. (See “Concert and sports tickets disappearing as memorabilia and collectables.”

Photos:
Post office comic by Marshall Ramsey (Postal Cartoons on Pinterest);
Mailbox as endangered species by Carmichael Lynch (See Carmichael Lynch Flickr page and article by Laughing Squid.)
Newspaper Road is a dead end (See article by Romenesko);
Concert Ticket Album for sale on Amazon.com.