In 1983, the American media company Knight Ridder, in conjunction
with AT&T, launched an online news service called Viewtron. Initially
a “videotex” service (similar to Ceefax, launched by the BBC in 1974),
Viewtron initially required a specialised terminal but very quickly
moved to being available on home computers. Launched in Florida first,
Knight Ridder began its news service offering The Miami Herald online
(the company itself was based at that time on the top floor of the Miami
Herald building), requiring subscribers to pay $600 for a terminal and,
according to company director Morton Goldstrom, offering “all the information I can imagine when I want it, the 21st century genie”
1
Knight
Ridder’s original plans were to sign up 5,000 customers to the system:
in addition to purchasing the terminal, subscribers would pay $12 per
month to Viewtron and then $1 per hour to Southern Bell for access to
the system. All the information that Morton Goldstrom could imagine
came at a significant price, but once Viewtron had jettisoned its specialist terminals, the service managed to extend to some 15 states before
being closed in 1986: the service was extremely slow and people ceased
to use the system once the novelty wore off. As subscribers departed
the service, Knight Ridder lost approximately $50 million and James
Batton, then president of the company, observed: “Videotex is not likely
to be a threat to newspapers in the foreseeable future.”
2
Viewtron was an experiment a decade ahead of its time, and demonstrates just how important it is that technology is viewed within a
wider context of financial and social operations. A recurrent theme
among Knight Ridder executives was that subscribers were not incorporating videotex news into their daily habits: as well as the connecting technology being slow and frustrating, users still relied on
television, radio, and print for their daily consumption of the news.
The entire ecosystem that would support an online publication did
not exist. By the late 1980s, Internet service providers such as Compuserve, America Online (later AOL), and Prodigy were beginning to
offer news services as part of their package, but it was not until the
wider adoption of Tim Berners Lee’s world wide web in the mid-1990s
1 The New Ecology
with AT&T, launched an online news service called Viewtron. Initially
a “videotex” service (similar to Ceefax, launched by the BBC in 1974),
Viewtron initially required a specialised terminal but very quickly
moved to being available on home computers. Launched in Florida first,
Knight Ridder began its news service offering The Miami Herald online
(the company itself was based at that time on the top floor of the Miami
Herald building), requiring subscribers to pay $600 for a terminal and,
according to company director Morton Goldstrom, offering “all the information I can imagine when I want it, the 21st century genie”
1
Knight
Ridder’s original plans were to sign up 5,000 customers to the system:
in addition to purchasing the terminal, subscribers would pay $12 per
month to Viewtron and then $1 per hour to Southern Bell for access to
the system. All the information that Morton Goldstrom could imagine
came at a significant price, but once Viewtron had jettisoned its specialist terminals, the service managed to extend to some 15 states before
being closed in 1986: the service was extremely slow and people ceased
to use the system once the novelty wore off. As subscribers departed
the service, Knight Ridder lost approximately $50 million and James
Batton, then president of the company, observed: “Videotex is not likely
to be a threat to newspapers in the foreseeable future.”
2
Viewtron was an experiment a decade ahead of its time, and demonstrates just how important it is that technology is viewed within a
wider context of financial and social operations. A recurrent theme
among Knight Ridder executives was that subscribers were not incorporating videotex news into their daily habits: as well as the connecting technology being slow and frustrating, users still relied on
television, radio, and print for their daily consumption of the news.
The entire ecosystem that would support an online publication did
not exist. By the late 1980s, Internet service providers such as Compuserve, America Online (later AOL), and Prodigy were beginning to
offer news services as part of their package, but it was not until the
wider adoption of Tim Berners Lee’s world wide web in the mid-1990s
1 The New Ecology