Digitizing the News: Innovation in Online Newspapers (Inside Technology) - Hardcover

""Digitizing the News"shows how dramatic innovations can unfold from the coevolution of social and technical choices made over several decades. Putting the news online is changing the production, editing, and consumption of news in ways that shape content in significant ways. How different enterprises have made these choices around the Internet and the news has created a variety of paths to the future of electronic news media. Students in the social sciences and humanities, particularly within communication and journalism, will value this book, which illustrates how research on new media can inform, and be informed by, social studies of science and technology."--William H. Dutton, Director, Oxford Internet Institute

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 yield 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 creation: the Technology section of The New York Times on the Web; the Virtual Voyager project of the HoustonChronicle.com; and the Community Connection initiative of New Jersey Online. Boczkowski's 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.