Digitizing The News: Innovation In Online Newspapers

by Pablo J. Boczkowski

In this study of how daily newspapers in America have developed electronic publishing ventures, Pablo Boczkowski shows that new media emerge not just in a burst of revolutionary technological change but by merging the structures and practices of existing media with newly available technical capabilities. His multi-disciplinary perspectives of science and technology, communication, and organization studies allow him to address the connections between technical, editorial, and work facets of new media. This approach yields analytical insights into the material culture of online newsrooms, the production processes of new media products, and the relationships between offline and online dynamics. Boczkowski traces daily newspapers' early consumer-oriented non-print publishing initiatives, from the now-forgotten videotex efforts of the 1980s to the rise of the World Wide Web in the mid- 1990s. He then examines the formative years of news on the Web during the second half of the 1990s, when the content of online newspapers varied from simple reproduction of the print edition to new material with interactive and multimedia features. With this picture of the recent history of non-print publishing as background, Boczkowski provides ethnographic, fly-on-the-wall accounts of three innovations in content the Technology section of the New York Times on the Web, which was initially intended as the newspaper's space for experimentation with online news; the Virtual Voyager project of the HoustonChronicle.com, in which reporters pushed the envelope of multimedia journalism; and the Community Connection initiative of New Jersey Online, in which users became content producers. His analyses of these ventures reveal how innovation in online newspapers became an ongoing process in which different combinations of initial conditions and local contingencies led publishers along divergent paths of content creation.

243 pages, Paperback

First published March 1, 2004

About the author

Pablo J. Boczkowski is Professor in the Department of Communication Studies at Northwestern University. He is the author of Digitizing the News: Innovation in Online Newspapers, coauthor of The News Gap: When the Information Preferences of the Media and the Public Diverge, and coeditor of Remaking the News: Essays on the Future of Journalism Scholarship in the Digital Age (all published by the MIT Press).

Reviews

[Carrie · Rating 3 out of 5]

This research is right in line with my own work, so it's sad that I just read this now. Case studies of three early efforts by newspapers to embrace new media forms, including NYT's Technology section, the Houston Chronicle's Virtual Voyages (early multimedia effort), and New Jersey's Community Connection (network of local nonprofits.

I was especially interested in reading about the nearly forgotten early efforts by newspapers in the 1980s and early 90s like videotex. Contrary to popular belief, it's not that newspapers have been totally unwilling to try new things; in fact they were among the first to realize the impact digital would have on news, and they did embrace innovation, though often the ways they went about it clung so heavily to print traditions that they were often doomed to fail. Also its kind of understandable that after huge investments in things like videotex didn't pan out, they were cautious going forward.

Funny how this book describes and documents a number of things now almost taken for granted as conventional in Web journalism circles, usefully helping to make the academic case, not just the circumstantial case, for things like the increasingly two-way, conversational nature of news, and the ways in which user-generated content challenges the hierarchical structure of classic newsroom bureaucracy.

No offense to Pablo given that sadly, this is what is taken for proof of scholarly acumen, but my only complaint is how this book explains what really are simple concepts and explains them in typically obtuse academic-ese. Bloggers like those at Nieman Lab somehow manage to explore these very same concepts in simple, easy to understand prose. Especially the last part of the book falls victim to this.

[Marcelo · Rating 5 out of 5]

Professor Boczkowski research is a great account of the first efforts of digitalization of news. It's a great register of that period. Beyond that, it teaches a lot about journalism's culture of innovation and its relations to other areas. Twelve years later, some lessons remain very up to date.