Distribution, Online

Thom Lieb & Sandra L. Nichols

For centuries, the dominant means of delivering the news was via print newspapers, magazines or newsletters. While radio and then television made serious inroads during the twentieth century, the biggest challenge to the dominance of print came at the turn of the twenty-first century with a widespread move to online distribution. Inspired partly by European experiments with delivering textual information via telephone and television, several U.S. media companies flirted with electronic delivery of information in the late 1970s. These videotex and teletext services sent text and low-definition graphics to subscribers' television sets. The systems were costly and slow and found little reception among readers, though the Minitel system in France did see some level of success. With the introduction of personal computers into the home in the 1980s, commercial dial-up services such as CompuServe, America Online, and Prodigy were developed, and some publishers experimented with delivering news over those services. ...

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