12 The New Ecology
that news services really began to take off. The first pioneers included
CNN, The Chicago Tribune, and Time Inc’s Pathfinder website. Before this, there existed a specialist series of “fax papers”, which had
a limited period to gain a foothold in the market before the web removed their reason for existence. Aimed at specialist (usually business) audiences, fax papers took advantage of the proliferation of fax
machines in the late 1980s to send news highlights to subscribers for
prices ranging from $400 per year (the cost of Tribfax, a product
of the Chicago Tribune) to $2,500 for the one-page fax paper sent
out daily by the Hartford Courant.
3
This hybrid of print and digital
cultures was doomed to failure as soon as general-purpose computers with Internet connections replaced the fax machines, as well as
American news sites web pages for international services such as the
Electronic Telegraph (1994) and BBC (1997) in the UK began to appear, although the Anglo-American dominance of the web meant that
sites in other countries only emerged more slowly: indeed, France’s
own national videotex service – Minitel – was incredibly successful
after its introduction in 1982, with 26 per cent of French homes having access to a Minitel terminal in 1993 (bringing in revenues of $1.3
billion) compared to 13 per cent with a PC and 11 per cent with cable
access.
4
By the early 2000s, online news services were becoming ubiquitous
across many parts of the globe, although the grip of news websites was
felt most keenly in the English-speaking world. In 1999, John Pavlik
was predicting that news junkies had “never had it so good” with news
available at the touch of a button,
5
but as the new millennium began
plenty of legacy media companies, such as ABC, were still very tentative when it came to rolling out truly multimedia programming
6
: at
that stage, connections were still not fast enough and there were still
too few users online to justify a wholesale shift online. By 2007, when
Apple unveiled the first iPhone, faster Internet and mobile connections
and eventually cheaper devices allowed the number of connected users
to explode: while online news at the end of the twentieth century had
been a novelty, by the beginning of the second decade it had become
the norm, with consequences that completely transformed the relationships between news sites and readers. In its annual Digital News Report
for 2018, for example, Reuters reported that social media – the prime
driver of news consumption growth for much of the previous decade –
had finally begun to decline in the face of mistrust surrounding fake
news; yet in many countries, it remained the primary source of information for many users.
7
Television and radio remain a significant part
of the mix for our consumption of news, but the rapid decline of print
in the past ten to fifteen years means that for many of us, our mobile
devices are the primary means by which we discover what is taking
place around us.
that news services really began to take off. The first pioneers included
CNN, The Chicago Tribune, and Time Inc’s Pathfinder website. Before this, there existed a specialist series of “fax papers”, which had
a limited period to gain a foothold in the market before the web removed their reason for existence. Aimed at specialist (usually business) audiences, fax papers took advantage of the proliferation of fax
machines in the late 1980s to send news highlights to subscribers for
prices ranging from $400 per year (the cost of Tribfax, a product
of the Chicago Tribune) to $2,500 for the one-page fax paper sent
out daily by the Hartford Courant.
3
This hybrid of print and digital
cultures was doomed to failure as soon as general-purpose computers with Internet connections replaced the fax machines, as well as
American news sites web pages for international services such as the
Electronic Telegraph (1994) and BBC (1997) in the UK began to appear, although the Anglo-American dominance of the web meant that
sites in other countries only emerged more slowly: indeed, France’s
own national videotex service – Minitel – was incredibly successful
after its introduction in 1982, with 26 per cent of French homes having access to a Minitel terminal in 1993 (bringing in revenues of $1.3
billion) compared to 13 per cent with a PC and 11 per cent with cable
access.
4
By the early 2000s, online news services were becoming ubiquitous
across many parts of the globe, although the grip of news websites was
felt most keenly in the English-speaking world. In 1999, John Pavlik
was predicting that news junkies had “never had it so good” with news
available at the touch of a button,
5
but as the new millennium began
plenty of legacy media companies, such as ABC, were still very tentative when it came to rolling out truly multimedia programming
6
: at
that stage, connections were still not fast enough and there were still
too few users online to justify a wholesale shift online. By 2007, when
Apple unveiled the first iPhone, faster Internet and mobile connections
and eventually cheaper devices allowed the number of connected users
to explode: while online news at the end of the twentieth century had
been a novelty, by the beginning of the second decade it had become
the norm, with consequences that completely transformed the relationships between news sites and readers. In its annual Digital News Report
for 2018, for example, Reuters reported that social media – the prime
driver of news consumption growth for much of the previous decade –
had finally begun to decline in the face of mistrust surrounding fake
news; yet in many countries, it remained the primary source of information for many users.
7
Television and radio remain a significant part
of the mix for our consumption of news, but the rapid decline of print
in the past ten to fifteen years means that for many of us, our mobile
devices are the primary means by which we discover what is taking
place around us.