Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login
How the newspaper industry tried to invent the Web but failed. (slate.com)
18 points by makimaki on Jan 6, 2009 | hide | past | favorite | 2 comments



It's hard to feel bad for an industry that has done things like this:

"So intense was the industry's devotion to videotext and so rampant its paranoia that some other medium would usurp its place in the media constellation that the American Newspaper Publishers Association lobbied Congress in 1980 to prevent AT&T from launching its own 'electronic yellow pages.'"


I like this part:

"Once they determined that nobody could make money from videotext and the technology posed no threat to the newsprint model, they were happy to shuttered their ventures."

This sounds remarkably similar to their current infatuation with Twitter. If Twitter were to suddenly lose cache, they'd be out of there lickety split, confident that it wasn't going to end them.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: