This is a collection of links and comments about the arrival of news (and other) publishing on the World Wide Web. It was originally a 1995 list for discussion by students in what is now UNC's JOMC-50, then stayed around for other visitors. It has grown into a five-part collection of more comments and links than you'll have time to read unless you give up having a life.
Approaches:
--- Bob Stepno
- Browse around your favorite kinds of media, find a few sites that interest you, and get a general idea of what they offer.
- Read a couple of the articles cited at the end of the list and make yourself an outline of the authors' suggestions for "news" publications online.
- Look at a couple of publications from each category below to see how well they fit the writers' descriptions, for better or for worse.
Note: If you want to read my own comments on some of these publications, see the annotated list, which is so long that you may prefer to its one-page-per-topic version. Let me know what you think.
Newspapers
Here are a few more online papers (I'd be happy to highlight particular stories; send me your nominations):
- The New York Times
- Bosnia: uncertain paths to peace, and its index
- New Media Tools for Online Journalism.
- Y2K problem
- Coverage of technology and education and reference links on the same subject.
- Navigator page "used by the newsroom of the New York Times."
- The Washington Post
- Mindy McAdams on the beginning, when it was called Digital Ink.
- user's guide
- print edition
- The Year 2000 election
- Newsweek is a sister publication of the Post. (See the discussion of media ownership and convergence farther down this page.)
- Archives of site reviews from the Post's regular technology page feature, WWW.Worth It.
- The NandO Times
- Nando's Princess Diana coverage, including the media backlash.
- Nando was started by The News and Observer in Raleigh, N.C., which is now a separate site.
- The Chicago Tribune
- reader registration?
- Web specials
- The newspaper
- Synergy City (AJR article)
- Mike Royko
- Mercury Center
- Doug Englebart feature.
- The Hartford Courant, "the nation's oldest newspaper of continuous publication."
- StarText at The Fort Worth Star Telegram predated the Internet, but is now on the Web.
- The Boston Globe at Boston.com.
- The San Francisco Chronicle
- The San Francisco Examiner
- The Los Angeles Times
- The New York Daily News
- USA Today
- The Christian Science Monitor
- The Wall Street Journal ($59 a year, but there's a free trial) and its Technology column
- Star Tribune, Minneapolis, Minn.
- The Philadelphia Inquirer and Daily News are both at Phillynews.com
- The Chronicle of Higher Education, the weekly guide to issues (and jobs) in academia... not to be confused with my old friends at The Chronicle, of Willimantic, Conn., a modest local paper with a modest Web presence.
- The Irish Times in Dublin.
- The Times, and other papers in London
- See Newslink at American Journalism Review for lists of thousands of other online papers.
Magazines
- The WELL, founded by the folks behind the Whole Earth catalog and magazine in 1985.
- Adbusters
- Mother Jones
- The National Review
- Educom Review and its email mailing list.
- Dirty Linen folk and world music.
- Soundings "The nation's boating newspaper"
Earlier it had stories online (including mine.
- Wired and spin-off HotWired
- IDG (computer magazines)
- Ziff-Davis (computer magazines and more)
- MacWorld
- Time at Time-Warner's Pathfinder.com
- Electronic Newsstand,
Born on the Web
- APB Online subtitles itself "The Source for Police and Crime News."
- Argon Zark!, probably the first full-length comic book made for the Web...
- Dr. Fun probably the Internet's first daily cartoon, launched in 1993 at Sunsite (now called Metalab)
- Suck.com, daily Net criticism
- Salon
- Feed and its archives
- Slate from Microsoft isfree again, mostly.
- C|NET and its news.com
- Computer Mediated Communication Magazine
- The Electronic Frontier Foundation Publications Archive
- Howard Rheingold
- WORD
- crayon.net
- Portals of various kinds
Convergence: TV, radio, mixed media and more
News Corp.
- Fox Network
- Fox News,
- Sky TV
- the New York Post
- iGuidenow is TV Guide Online
- Delphi was bought, then sold
- Camden Lock was its London counterpart.
Other broadcast companies & mergers
- PBS and NPR which are featuring Web supplements to news and more.
- CNN Interactive (now with Time-Warner links)
- CBS Television Home Page
- ABC Television Home Page
- NBC Television Home Page
- NBC meets MSN including daily news
- WRAL in Raleigh, my favorite local station site.
- The Antenna, a site about broadcasting and the Web.
- Radio & Television News Directors Foundation online.
...many more publications
- NewsLink includes listings of thousands of online publications, as well as being the online edition of American Journalism Review.
- The State of the American Newspaper series including Synergy City, on the Chicago Tribune Co. (also mentioned in the newspaper section), and a report on the decline of statehouse coverage.
- MediaInfo Interactive is Editor & Publisher
- Yahoo provides news from Reuters, and category lists of newspapers, even Tabloids.
Commentary/Discussion
Online or Not, Newspapers Suck by Jon Katz, originally in Wired magazine. Joshua Quittner introduced Way New Journalism in two articles in Wired. (Quittner later went to Time magazine's Digital Daily.) Carl Steadman on the failings of "way new journalism." in the online Feed Mag, March '96. (hit "cancel" if asked for a password) Driving a Newspaper on the Data Highway by Mindy McAdams, co-author of The Internet Handbook for Writers, Researchers, and Journalists. The Evolution of the Newspaper of the Future by Chris Lapham Tabloids, Talk Radio, and the Future of News: Technology's Impact on Journalism, by Ellen Hume Katherine Fulton saw the online world coming in 1993, for Columbia Journalism Review (CJR) and kept looking in 1996 with http://www.journalism.now -- A tour of our uncertain future. Digital reporting: We're All Nerds Now (CJR March/April 1999), includes comments from pioneers in precision journalism or computer assisted reporting.
Comments: bob@stepno.com
The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Last revision: 01/Mar/99