OJR: The Online Journalism Review

A. Michael Noll

Stirling, New Jersey

A. Michael Noll is Professor Emeritus of Communications and former dean at the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism at the University of Southern California.

Contact:

Articles:

These articles are the work of their author, and do not necessarily reflect the opinion of nor an assignment by OJR.

No! to newspaper bailouts

December 15, 2009
A. Michael Noll is Professor Emeritus of Communications and former dean at the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism at the University of Southern California. He writes in response to American government: It's always subsidized commercial media.

There will always be a need for the reporting of current events, but because of the Internet, journalism is undergoing revolutionary change in terms of how news is distributed and accessed. Conventional newspapers are thus in crisis, and there are some who propose a Federal bailout. No way!

Back in the 1980s, a couple of newspapers investigated the prospects for electronic information through a service known as videotex.¹ I was involved while working at AT&T with the planning of a trial of videotex jointly conducted by AT&T and Knight-Ridder Newspapers in Florida. AT&T and Knight-Ridder correctly saw the coming of a day when news and information would be accessed and obtained electronically over telecommunication. However, the use of the home TV set for display and the concept of a single large centralized database of information were all wrong – and videotex ultimately failed.²

After the failure of videotex, newspapers became smug and mostly ignored the coming of the Internet. They did not seem to realize that although much of their profits came from classified ads, this was exactly the kind of information that could best be obtained on-line over the Internet. When they finally woke up, it was too late. More...

3 Comments | Archive Link