I used to ask new hires: When, how, and why did you "go online?"
The question seems quaint now, and it's been more than a decade since I asked it. After all, many of today's job prospects grew up with home broadband access to the World Wide Web, text messaging on their phones, and possibly a laptop in their bags.
But maybe it still applies.
I "went online" years before there was a Web. In the mid-1980s, I got a computer and a 300-bps modem. I discovered a whole world of online conversation. Before long, I was hooked, and within a year I was running my own Citadel bulletin board.
I learned the C programming language to write software so I could hook my Atari ST to Usenet. I begged and borrowed connections to get networked email, and discovered the Internet long before most people heard of it.
My experience was entirely focused on interpersonal communications -- one-to-one, many-to-many.
This shaped the way I looked at "online publishing" when Prodigy, AOL, and then the Internet began to upend everything we used to know about media.
The first newspaper online service I built, back in 1994-95, included community publishing for groups, discussion forums, private messaging and Internet mail.
Then came a wave of news companies rushing to get online, without stopping to think about how people use the medium. We wound up with shovelware "online editions" -- boring, predictable replicants of printed newspapers that failed to take advantage of any of the Internet's capabilities.
Most newspapers imagine themselves to have moved beyond that stage. I'm not so sure. "Allowing" comments on stories is hardly innovation.
So, how did you go online? And why? And how has it shaped your approach? Do you still think of it as a publishing medium? Or is it something else?
Comments
My first time(s)
On Feb. 23, 1982, I wrote checks totaling $3,867.25 to Nabih's Inc., on Davis Street in Evanston, and became the proud owner of an Apple //e with green-screen monitor, 80-column card, 1200-baud modem, and dot-matrix printer. (Aside: I was out for a walk in Evanston on Friday and walked down Davis on my way back to the Northwestern campus. Lo and behold, it's still there.)
I was online the next day, connecting to Tymnet to upload and download files to the Tribune. My Tribune ID was CTD013, and not too long thereafter I had my first online, real-time chat, with correspondent Howard Witt in Moscow. Before the week was out I had accounts on the Source and CompuServ and was ranging far and wide online. Well, I was ranging, anyway. Unlike your experience, Steve, interpersonal communications took a back seat at first; mostly I wanted an efficient way to edit at home, and I wanted to make the computer do what I told it. I didn't learn anything useful like C, however; I taught myself how to write rudimentary programs in Applesoft.
In 1991 Tribune did a JV with America Online, of which it owned 10%, to create Chicago Online and get involved in "online publishing." A lot of the early activity was indeed focused on communicating with the audience through message boards, the most popular of which turned out to maintained by columnists like Eric Zorn. I got my first taste of being flamed by the online audience when, as business editor, we redid our stock tables to focus on high-volume stocks, and got blasted by people who relied on the paper to tell them how well prepared they were whenever the world financial system collapsed -- by watching the movement of a handful of thinly traded gold stocks and ADUs.
I think that told me that things were going to be different, or as you put it, "shaped my approach." I know when I started chicago.tribune.com in 1995 I was pretty focused on how we would incorporate not only the users, but the best content from around the Web; I wrote a job description for a "links editor" who essentially would curate the Web, making sure we were always pointing to great stuff. This made me very unpopular with the people running other newspaper Web sites, many of whom were telling their bosses it would be possible to tend profitable walled gardens. But I had already seen at my Web site that it was way better to make sure people had easy access to darn near everything interesting.
Is the Web a publishing medium? Sure; just as Gutenberg's press (http://bit.ly/EQrdG) gave him an outlet, the Web provided one for many early adopters, inventors, and oddballs. Is it primarily a publishing medium? I don't know if it is primarily anything. Ultimately it may become the, er, ultimate branding tool, for individuals and companies that only incidentally are publishers (see posts today from @pottsmark and @jeffjarvis). Certainly it is the most efficient place yet to find important things about which to think and to write.
We are too soon old and too late smart, say the Pennsylvania Dutch. But that is better than being merely old.
Owen Youngman
When I went online
Online
When to go online
Going online
going online
BBS
Seems like a million years ago now
Hey Paranoid Freaks Firstly,