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

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

Tech & News -- Too Late an Embrace

Volume 1:
CEOs, Coders, News Execs, Disrupters

And it gave you a little of everything, and, again, aggregated, because that is Yahoo’s DNA, but, nonetheless, simple.
Paul Saffo, at The Institute For The Future, talks about his 30 year rule.
The central issue was they couldn’t get the paper out. We were so hamstrung by labor problems and technology problems that four nights a week we were more than an hour late in getting the paper in the trucks to get it to the customers with a newspaper that if it’s 20 minutes late it’s useless because the customer’s gone.

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Tech Journalism's Evolution

Volume 2:
Tech Journalists

It was a different time where I was also young and so I would go out drinking with the same people I covered in a way that I had no access to with congressmen that I wrote about.
Julia Angwin
Computing had a seat at the table but it hadn’t eaten the world. Then, I watched as everything changed.
John Markoff
In a lot of ways it was easier for us in the early days….Easier for us to get closer, to get a unique stories but harder to get information probably because information wasn’t flowing out everywhere.
Evelyn Richards

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The Big Picture

For most of the 20th century, any list of America’s wealthiest families would include quite a few publishers generally considered to be in the “news business”: the Hearsts, the Pulitzers, the Sulzbergers, the Grahams, the Chandlers, the Coxes, the Knights, the Ridders, the Luces, the Bancrofts — a tribute to the fabulous business model that once delivered the country its news. While many of those families remain wealthy today, their historic core businesses are in steep decline (or worse), and their position at the top of the wealth builders has long since been eclipsed by people with other names: Gates, Page and Brin and Schmidt, Zuckerberg, Bezos, Case, and Jobs — builders of digital platforms that, while not specifically targeted at the “news business,” have nonetheless severely disrupted it.

Keep reading Vol 1. 

The Tech Journalists

A transformative wave washed over the world economy this past quarter-century and technology journalists were its chroniclers and front-row witnesses. Many, among the twenty interviewed, say a catastrophic disruption of the news business was to be expected. But they feel their warnings went largely unheard within their workplaces, a contributing factor to the industry’s late and ineffectual counter-efforts. In contrast to pessimism about the future financial underpinnings of their business, they’re optimistic about the outlook for journalism as new tools, audiences and approaches emerge and evolve.

Keep reading Vol 2. 

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Volume
Vol 1: CEOs, Coders, News Execs, Disrupters
Vol 2: Tech Journalists

Four veterans of digital journalism and media — John Huey, Martin Nisenholtz, Paul Sagan, and later John Geddes — interviewed dozens of people who played important roles in the intersection of media and technology — from CEOs to coders, journalists to disruptors.

Riptide is the result: more than 50 hours of video interviews and two narrative essays that trace the evolution of digital news from early experiments to today. It’s what really happened to the news business.

Read Vol. 1  
See interviews