Newsrooms and the Disruption of the Internet: A Short History of Disruptive Technologies, 1990-2010

Newsrooms and the Disruption of the Internet is an insightful account of what happened when the internet first arrived in the 1990s and early 2000s in the recently computerized, but still largely unchanged, newspaper industry.

Providing a focused narrative of how the internet disrupted news collection, editing, presentation and dissemination, the book examines the role of the internet from helpful adjunct to extension to, eventually, successor to the traditional print product. Experiments by large national newspaper “brands” and other first-adopters in the 1990s are described, tracing the slow adoption of the internet by chains and large metro papers, followed by the smaller daily and weekly newspapers by the early 2000s. The book describes the changes that arrived as more “Web 2.0” technologies become prevalent and as social media shifted the news-media landscape in the mid-to-late 2000s, ultimately changing how most people in the West consumed and thought of “the news.”

This book is intended for academics and researchers in the fields of journalism studies, history of technology, and media studies, especially those interested in transitions from analog to digital technology, and the initial adoption of the commercial internet.

Will Mari is Assistant Professor at the Manship School of Mass Communication, Louisiana State University, USA. He is a media historian and interested in analog-to-digital transitions in journalism and the history of media technology, more broadly. He received his PhD from the University of Washington, USA, and his MPhil from Wolfson College, Cambridge, UK.