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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...
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