Reference:
Mari, Will. 2022. Newsrooms and the Disruption of the Internet: A Short History of Disruptive Technologies, 1990–2010. Routledge. https://www.routledge.com/Newsrooms-and-the-Disruption-of-the-Internet-A-Short-History-of-Disruptive/Mari/p/book/9780367342975.
This book is a detailed account of how news organizations in the U.S. and U.K responded to society-wide changes brought by internet technologies and the World Wide Web. The account is informative in many ways, recounting key events year-by-year and the discourse by news professionals and executives. Not surprisingly, the gist is that they couldn’t predict the future, responded the best they could, got some things right and some things wrong.
Mari’s writing is clear and engaging, and while it’s intended to be a scholarly account, the book would be very accessible to non-academic audiences. The author pulls together many, many historical references, e.g. conference presentations, trade magazine articles, and many other insider resources, which provide access to the materials on which he based his account. This is useful for any information history of the internet and news.
That said, there are some gaps, which I’m confident the author would acknowledge. There is no discussion of the rise of Google, Facebook, and other platforms that began dominating the news industry prior to 2010, and no mention of shifts in power or the role of capitalistic enterprise in the story he tells. Mari covers the period during which newcomers like Craigs List siphoned classified advertising dollars from newspapers, including some specifics on how much revenue was lost in which period of time. But he seeks to dispel the “myth” that Craigs List was the primary source of that loss, despite the size of the shift in Craigs List’s favor.
Further, any hint of critical theory is not present in this book. The only theoretical lens used here is the “diffusion of innovation theory,” which has to do with the spread and speed of technology adoption by innovators, early adopters, early majority, late majority, and laggards. This is a work of history, and it would be interesting to know more about the author’s critical interpretation of the story.
But we get parts of that story that are rarely mentioned in other accounts of technology’s role in reshaping the news industry. One of the best parts of the book covers how large players in the news industry (e.g. Knight Ridder, AP, etc) tried to build large-scale collaborations to create new kinds of news services and revenue streams. As Mari details, all of these, however failed.
There’s a lot of historical value in these accounts, but also some errors of fact or interpretation. Several times in the book, the author describes “the internet’s original sin” as a failure to adopt paywalls for access to online news. But the originator of this term, Ethan Zuckerman, was talking about the sin of advertising as a business model, and doesn’t even mention the word “paywall” in the article in which he introduced the term. To be fair, Zucherman does discuss subscription models, but it’s in the context of 1) micropayments, and 2) the idea (never implemented) of users paying a subscription to Google and Facebook so they won’t have to surveil everyone and target them with behavioral advertising. I pretty sure there’s research showing that paywalls aren’t a viable revenue model for most news organizations, with the exception of industry (and niche) leaders like the New York Times or The Wall Street Journal. From my experience while working with smaller local new organizations, neither paywalls nor advertising has been able to pay the bills, especially given the ad market dominance of Google and Facebook.
To be fair, the story the author tells stops at 2010, and so much change has occurred since then. Will Mari’s scholarship on the history of technology in journalism is quite an achievement. His previous works include The American Newsroom: A History, 1920-1960, and A Short History of Disruptive Journalism Technologies, which covers the socio-technical history of American newsrooms from 1960 to 1990. It will be interesting to read what he has to say about the next chapter in this ongoing story, particularly as use of artificial intelligence becomes normalized in newsrooms everywhere.
Adventures in Information Science 