The 5th Estate: Citizen News

I believe that the hoops we had to jump through to get newspaper stories online influenced newspaper managers’ perceptions about the difficulty of online publishing. Sure, many of us had personal websites and knew how it easy it was to slap together a page in HTML (or by using an early page editor). But senior newspaper managers, the people plotting the business future of the industry, saw online publishing only through the prism of getting their content from their proprietary print systems through programs like Pantheon and onto the Web. That led many of them to see online publishing as something difficult, creating a high barrier of entry for potential competitors.

If newspapers were worried, it was about big-money rivals such as Microsoft‘s Sidewalk. Individually published websites and blogs, when they started to appear, weren’t n anyone’s radar as competition. Managers saw online publishing as demanding complicated, expensive, technical solutions.

via How early online newspaper production tools led the industry down the wrong path.

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