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Introduction
A New York Daily News truck heads out for delivery, 1978. (AP) For most of the 20th century, any list of America’s wealthiest families would include quite a few publishers generally considered to be...
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Chapter 1: The Teletext/Videotex Era
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,”...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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Chapter 6: The Return of Newspapers
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...
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Chapter 7: The Nerds and The Newsies
December 14, 1995: NBC CEO Robert Wright and Microsoft chairman Bill Gates announce MSNBC. (AP/Marty Lederhandler) The very core of the revolution that was now underway was technological, with every...
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Chapter 8: The Innovator’s Dilemma
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...
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Chapter 9: Birthing the Blogosphere
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...
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Chapter 10: The Rising Tide Lifts All Boats
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,...
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Chapter 11: From the Ashes
Arianna Huffington in Madrid for the launch of El Huffington Post, 2012. (AP/Paul White) The dot-com crash and ensuing Web Winter hit the Bay Area start-up scene, not to mention the rest of the web...
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Chapter 12: Google, The Second Coming
Google’s Larry Page and Sergey Brin, before the company’s IPO, 2004. (AP/Ben Margot) As one of the fastest growing, most valuable companies on the planet, millions of words have been spilled on the...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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A rough timeline
Here are a few of the people, companies, and events that have played a role in the collision of technology and media over the past half-century or more. .timelinerightsidebarbox,...
View ArticleWelcome
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...
View ArticleRandall Rothenberg: What about Bloomberg?
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...
View ArticleA view from a Chicago newspaper publisher (and Riptide dad)
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...
View ArticleWho we interviewed
We started by identifying the institutions that we believed were central to the Riptide story — the change of news through the rise of digital technology, beginning around 1980. Then we sought to...
View ArticleA thoughtful critique in paidContent
Mathew Ingram’s thoughtful article in paidContent on this project raises the question of whether we, the authors, seek to absolve industry leaders (and, by extension, ourselves) of responsibility for...
View ArticleAnother Take on the “Original Sin” of Publishers
We spend a great deal of time in the Riptide interviews and essay looking at what’s been called the Original Sin of the news business. That is, when news business owners (mainly newspaper and magazine...
View ArticleThe Washington Post Relies on Riptide to Explain the Forces that Forced the...
When we started working on Riptide last winter, we hoped it would be a future resource for researchers and reporters alike trying to understand what happened to the legacy news business when it ran...
View ArticleGolden Age
Henry Blodget offered the most optimistic point-of-view among our interviewees with regard to the state of modern journalism. His basic premise is that there has never been more good information...
View ArticleBuzzFeed, Vice and the next generation in serious news?
Noteworthy story in The Independent by Ian Burrell pointing out the investments being made at Vice and Buzzfeed to fund original journalism, including full-on investigative reporting. The opportunity...
View ArticleThe Bubble’s beside the point
The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times all ran articles this week on the rapidly changing digital news landscape. All explore whether the recent funding of several digital...
View ArticleThe Bubble’s beside the point (Part II)
Today, The New York Times reports a “major expansion” at the Washington Post. We spent a lot of time interviewing folks at the Post for Riptide. We went back to their earliest online investments in...
View ArticlePublisher as Platform – A Perspective from Jonathan Glick
Jonathan Glick, the founder and CEO of Sulia, wrote a terrific piece on the idea of publisher as platform for Recode today. (Full disclosure: I am on the Sulia Board of Directors.) Glick begins with a...
View ArticleWill evolving rules around net neutrality further hamper creating new models...
It’s difficult to miss the current debate over what’s known as net neutrality, or the rules that govern how the Internet works. Last week the New York Times proclaimed, “F.C.C., in a Shift, Backs Fast...
View ArticleThe Great Unwatched
The trend of analog marketing dollars becoming digital dimes supporting online content isn’t abating. Earlier this week, David Segal in The Times literally undressed the online video ad market and...
View ArticleChristensen versus Porter and The New York Times
The New York Times is running a brilliant article today about the Harvard Business School and the emerging Internet technologies that might destroy its business model. In it, the authors turn to two...
View ArticleHBS, the NYT and the Star System
My first post on the excellent New York Times article about business model disruption at the Harvard Business School compared the School’s attempts to sustain its existing economics with similar...
View ArticleMr Penny-and-a-Half
Henry Blodget’s Riptide interview is one of my favorites. In a sea of mostly negative prognostications about the future of quality journalism, Henry stands almost alone as an unrelenting optimist. His...
View ArticleCould Business Information Services Have Saved Newspapers?
Early on in the Riptide project I suggested to John Huey and Paul Sagan that we develop a “sidebar” in the area of Business Information Services. My thought was that newspapers were among the early...
View ArticleYahoo, Marissa Mayer and the Future of Journalism
Nicholas Carlson’s piece in The New York Times Magazine this week attempts to answer the question: “What happened when Marissa Mayer tried to be Steve Jobs?” It’s a blistering critique, characterizing...
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Tech Beat: Reporters Covering the Digital Era Assess the News Business’s...
Attendees at the annual PC Forum, Phoenix, Arizona, February 5-8, 1984. Among those pictured are, standing from left, Michele Preston, from L.F. Rothschild, Unterberg, Towbin, Bill Gates, from...
View ArticleVol 2 — The Tech Beat and Site Changes
Writing the second act, when you didn’t write the first is always a challenge but I got lucky on three counts. The tech reporters I talked with were, as the interviews show, uniformly chatty, fun and...
View ArticleRiptide Event at Boston University – October 26
Please join us at BU on Monday, October 26 at 5:30PM for a discussion of the Riptide project, including new interviews conducted by John Geddes, Ex-Managing Editor at The New York Times We will hold...
View ArticleRiptide on the Road
With the launch of Riptide’s second essay by John Geddes, we went back out to talk about the project at a few events around the country. If we’re in your city, we’d love to see you. Completed: Monday,...
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