Online Journalism: The History Repeating? (Week 2)

By paraphrasing the title of one of the Propellerheads’  most famous songs, I would like to review the history of online journalism from a historical point of view. As a little research indicates, the history of the rising of this way of journalism has a lot in common with the rise of radio and television.

As it happened to TV news and radio news, Online news can not be understood without a technology that supports it. In this way, online journalism can not be understood without the Internet as its medium and computers as its main tools. To find out which one can be the first ancestor of this way of journalism, we should go back to the end of the 60’s and the beginning of the 70’s. At that time, we can find the first seed of what later became the Internet and online journalism. The first has its roots in the DARPA project, a military communication system designed by the USA that later developed into World Wide Web. The roots of digital journalism can be founded in the teletext, called at that time ‘A Rodolex in the Sky’. As the primitive forms of TV and radio news, those first examples of digital journalism were based on previous technologies, for example, teletext was based on TV instead of the Internet, in the same way as TV news followed radio news format in their early years and the first radio news broadcasting was not much different from ‘reading newspapers’.

Regarding to the criticism, TV news were, at least, as much criticised as digital journalism is nowadays. Most of critics take as point of departure for their arguments the hypothesis of the displacement of traditional news by online news and citizen journalism. Something happened some decades ago with the rise of television news broadcast, that was said to not be able displace newspapers in the field of information (Untelevisable Times, 1946).

It seems to be cyclical process. Everytime a new technology arises and carries some development in the field of journalism,  more consevative critics see it as the devil, while more progresist critics see a new world of opportunities to make things better.

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