A Short History of Disruptive Journalism Technologies

1960-1990

Will Mari

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780815367918
• eBook ISBN: 9781351256223
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Journalism
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

A Short History of Disruptive Journalism Technologies provides a swift analysis of the computerization of the newsroom, from the mid-1960s through to the early 1990s. It focuses on how word processing and a number of related affordances, including mobile-reporting tools, impacted the daily work routines of American news workers.

The narrative opens with the development of mainframes and their attendant use as databases in large, daily newspapers, It moves on to the "minicomputer" era and explores initial news-worker experiences with computers for editing and publication. Following this, the book examines the microprocessor era, and the rise of "smart" terminals, "microcomputers," and off-the-shelf hardware/software, along with the increasing use of computers in smaller news organizations. Mari then turns to the use of pre-internet networks, wire-services and bulletin boards deployed for user interaction. He looks at the integration of decentralized computer networks in newsrooms, with a mix of content-management systems and PCs, and the increasing use of pagers and cellphones for news-gathering, including the shift from "portable" to mobile conceptualizations for these technologies.

A Short History of Disruptive Journalism Technologies is an illuminating survey for students and instructors of journalism studies. It represents an important acknowledgement of the impact of pre-internet technological disruptions which led to the even more disruptive internet- and related computing technologies in the latter 1990s and through the present.

1 Introduction

Toward a history of disruptive journalism technologies

Before the internet and the computer, newsrooms and news workers¹ were wired and mobile.

But when I began research for this monograph, my initial conceptualization of newsroom computerization,² including the use of pre-internet networks and mobile-tech adoption by news workers and in newsrooms,³ was to think of separate, if parallel, technology tools, that is, the car, telephone, fax machine, telegraph, scanner, and so forth. These, though, I naively realized later, operated alongside one another and then came together in the period from the 1950s through the 1990s when the advent of the civilian internet early in the latter decade meant, in time, nothing less than the transformation of journalism.⁴

Now, having read through much more of the journalism trade literature of the latter Cold War, I have come to the humbling conclusion that a more holistic, earlier-than-expected computer-centric approach would be more appropriate. The use of the computer by newsrooms was disruptive, but not in the ways I had thought. Newspapers, large and small, adopted computers as part of centralized minicomputer/video-display terminal (VDT) systems, used fax machines to send optical-scan-readable news copy as part of wire-service networks and dispatched reporters to political conventions and sporting events to send back their stories via modems and acoustic couplers in sophisticated and pioneering ways. Computers were expensive, bulky and often available initially to only the largest news organizations, but present, and in use, throughout the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s.

One of this project’s chief contributions, then, will be to show the uneven, but early, computerization of the newsroom across a range of news-gathering and news-curation and news-producing activities from the mid-1960s through the early 1990s. News workers used pre-internet databases and networks and at first proprietary, then more off-the-shelf (i.e., ersatz), software and hardware systems, with operating systems and network software (i.e., MS-DOS and UNIX) that both previewed use by the wider public but also paralleled developments in the software industry. As information workers, journalists used computers to report the news, store it and share it with others. They did not exist, of course, in a vacuum of singular circumstances, but were themselves a force and a factor in the history of hardware and software in American businesses.

Their role, then, as early adopters of computers for their occupation is worthy of study, but also interesting in and of itself as part of the larger story of journalism and technology.

Sources/inspirations

This study borrows from the literature of science and technology studies, journalism studies, the sociology of work, and other related social-science fields. While other scholars, notably Matthew Kirschenbaum, have explored the use of the word processor and computer in contemporary literature, few others have touched explicitly on the use of computers in journalism during the latter Cold War.⁵ A major focus of this study will be on how word processing impacted the daily work routines of American news workers, but even this fundamental technology will be examined alongside a number of related affordances, including mobile-reporting tools.

This study also responds to calls for a “materiality”-infused approached to media-history research, in which things and tangible technologies form a major part of the story(ies) of adoption, resistance and change.⁶ While devices such as cameras, cars, telephones and typewriters are examples of material objects and tools influencing and even radically alternating news work, I will argue that the hardware and software associated with newsroom computerization was at least as impactful on news work as the aforementioned machines combined.

Looking, then, at the use of such tools in the pre-internet era is helpful in understanding the present and even the future (cautiously), as it shows the long tail of development and context for present-day technologies. Mobile reporting, for example, did not emerge in the 2000s, but had been present since at least the mid-century, if not before.⁷

I should mention at the outset what this project is not, in addition to what it aspires to be. It is not an exhaustive history of the computer in the newsroom, though it is among the first to examine the computerization of the newsroom, during any era. It is not a history of word processing or any other explicit genre of software, though, following Kirschenbaum’s example, specifics will be included wherever possible. I am not a historian of computing, nor a computer scientist, and my training and theoretical orientation draws from my identity as a media historian and journalism-studies scholar, but I am agnostic and open to approaches from sister fields. Furthermore, this is not a history of software alone (though software that edited text and executed basic layout functions will be mentioned fairly extensively). I will not cover extensively the growth of various Videotex and Teletext services that arose and then faded in the 1980s. These ancillary technologies are important precursors to the internet, but did not directly concern most news workers. This is, finally, not a study of newspaper production technologies per se. These are defined as the printing, distribution and other “making” processes of the newspaper plant. For that I defer to my colleagues Susan Keith and Juliette de Maeyer (among others).

Instead, I am chiefly focused on news-gathering, initial editing and curation technologies associated with and powered by the computer, such as those encountered and used by the typical news worker in North America (and to a lesser extent, the United Kingdom and Canada) in the latter Cold War. This is a survey of those analog and early digital antecedent tools used by news workers and the news industry, and that led up to the even more disruptive internet- and related computing technologies in the latter 1990s and through the present. It covers Cold War-era computing and related tech tools that came before but influenced those that came after.

So why stop at c. 1990?⁸ And why start with the 1950s and 1960s? By covering the immediate period that led up to the internet, I cover pre-internet technological disruptions of and within journalism, of which there are enough and which have enough impact on the field of journalism to deserve their own separate, sustained attention – not least of which is an examination, which I attempt briefly, of the computerization of the newsroom.

To the best of my knowledge, there is no such study available in English at this point, though I hope more will follow. Following in the path of such cultural historians as Robert Darnton and, within the realm of media history and sociology, Michael Schudson, I have attempted a “thick” description of events whenever possible and also tried, if haltingly, to write an initial and broad narrative of how computers came to the newsroom. By looking at those devices, along with early networks, I hope to provide critical context on the further disruptions brought by the internet.

Context on Cold War computing and the newsroom

A number of scholars have examined the recent history of the impact of technology(ies) on global newsroom cultures, including the disruption and evolution of work routines, journalistic authority, role changes, and engagement with audiences, among many other subjects. The general trend has been to complicate, rather than to simplify, “the role of technology in how journalism works,” as Matt Carlson has framed it succinctly.⁹ Indeed, “past generations of news workers confronted the implementation of new newsroom technologies with an array of contradictory reactions, from the assuredness of continuity to fear of disruption to the hopefulness of reinvention, before they became an unnoticed part of how news was created.”¹⁰ Henrik Örnebring has explored the up-skilling, de-skilling and reskilling of reporters in Scandinavia and in Europe with the arrival of the internet, as has Nikki Usher and Mark Deuze, in newsroom culture in the United States.¹¹ Kevin Barnhurst and John Nerone have similarly examined how technologies (plural!) have impacted how news is gathered and produced.¹² But going back to the seminal studies of Gaye Tuchman, Herbert Gans, Mark Fishman, but also Leo Rosten and Warren Breed, other scholars were intrigued by what technology, and specifically the computer, were doing to journalism and its practices.

Among the first was Ben Bagdikian, in his RAND-funded Information Machines, from 1971. While certainly publisher-oriented and optimistic (to say the least) about the role of technology in improving the reach and ability of newspapers to do reporting, his basic belief in the role of networks and computers to democratize access to information was, if not prophetic, at least prescient.¹³ He predicted, for example, the increasing importance of memory storage for journalism, and the ability to share and access it across platforms (what we might call “devices” today).¹⁴ Bagdikian believed that the computer would be the central device for journalism by the end of the century, and he was right.

Another early, and underappreciated, observer of the initial computerization of the newsroom was British journalist-turned-scholar Anthony Smith. Because he was steeped deeply in the European experience of newsroom technology-adoption, writing as he was in the midst of change, his perspective remains useful.¹⁵ In situ, Smith observed the rise of video-display terminals and centralized minicomputer systems, among other devices, which will be explored in more detail in this study. His insights, such as the challenges reporters would have in adapting to new means of inputting their stories, make his research still relevant today as a primary source.

In his words:

The creation of editorial “front-end” systems (for reporters’ direct input of text to the computer) depends entirely upon the acceptance by reporters of the use of vdt’s [sic; video-display, or “dumb” terminals, otherwise abbreviated as VDTs] for normal work. Many older reporters preferred to retire rather than learn the new skills – which are greater than those necessary for typing.

He goes on: “The [VDT] had to pass from an outlandish and experimental tool to a glamorous modern necessity before front-end systems could be brought in to the average newspaper.”¹⁶ These and other observations from then-contemporary researchers have shaped my own study, along with this guiding question: How did rank-and-file news workers, and their observers, experience the computerization of the newsroom as it happened? What does that mean for the present moment?

Following Andrew Abbott, my focus therefore is on the actual control over work news workers felt they had, if not held in reality, during the latter Cold War,¹⁷ with a focus not so much on tenuous and subjective attempts to pin down what, exactly, “professional” identities meant as affected by technology tools, but rather on what the situation was on the ground, in newsrooms and in the field.¹⁸

But as any study of digital-technology-wrought interregnums would be remiss without, I must mention the work of Elizabeth Eisenstein, and her research on the long and messy transition in Europe to printing technology from the handwritten processes (in the sixteenth century) that had come before.¹⁹ Eisenstein, herself reacting to the ideas of Marshall McLuhan and his Gutenberg Galaxy, examined how printing did not arrive in one piece: many printers and many innovations had to occur, and not in a preordained way, for our book- (and ultimately magazine- and newspaper-) culture to take root.

Finally, though, among the studies most relevant to the transition to a more computerized, mobile newsroom during the 1970s and 1980s is the work of Matthew Kirschenbaum.²⁰ While he is more focused on the concepts underlying and embedded in “word processing” as it developed from the 1960s through the 1980s and the adoption of related software and hardware by elite authors, journalists-as-authors certainly benefited from the pioneering efforts of novelists and researchers alike (for instance: as will be explored in more depth, MIT collaborated with both writers and publishers in the 1970s to develop now-ubiquitous tools such as layout/pagination software, data transfer across networks and text editing). Kirschenbaum’s call for specifics, in terms of programming, hardware manufacturers, donors, early users and so forth, has helped to drive this study in its quest for trends, dates, corporate research and development and other high-level trends in newsroom computerization.²¹

Following his admonition to pay attention t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgments
• List of abbreviations
• 1 Introduction: toward a history of disruptive journalism technologies
• 2 The mainframe era: initial computerization of the newsroom from the mid-1950s to the 1960s
• 3 The minicomputer era: c. 1970–1982
• 4 The microprocessor era: c. 1982–1992
• 5 Rise of the internet and the “full” computerization of the newsroom
• 6 Conclusion: the mid-1990s and what came after
• Bibliography and notes on sources
• Index