Steve Yelvington just reminded me of my first major source of online news... via a pre-Web graphical system called "Prodigy," started by IBM, Sears and CBS in 1984 -- a full 10 years before the Web took off (although CBS left the partnership before it opened for business in 1988).
Prodigy used old-fashioned blocky computer graphics intended for slow-speed modem connections, along with its own network of dial-in numbers. Its features included e-mail, discussion forums and online shopping, with celebrity-experts in charge of some Q&A sections. (One was Jane Fonda, in her aerobics-video health guru persona. To get to her area you would type "Jump Jane Fonda.")
The trial markets for Prodigy service were in California, Georgia and Connecticut, where I lived, so I had an early start. The now-defunct PC Week magazine paid me for an in-depth review of the system just as it went national -- an article the magazine never printed. I was told its business-oriented readers weren't interested in a 'home' computer service. (Ironically, my article included interviews with "early adopter" employees of a major insurance company who had been given Prodigy accounts as an experiment in online communication.)
Five years later, as the Web took off, Prodigy added an Internet service to its "Prodigy classic" dial-up. Later it moved into the high-speed DSL business. Stories said the founding corporations lost more than a billion dollars. You'll still see an "@prodigy.net" e-mail address now and then, but these days the company is owned by SBC, the biggest telecommunications company I'd never heard of. Its website identifies it as "the parent company of Southwestern Bell, Pacific Bell, Ameritech,
Nevada Bell and SNET... one of the largest telecommunications
companies in the world." Who knew? Alas, I don't even see a "Prodigy history" section on the current prodigy.net site map. Back to "OK journalism": Prodigy did put some newspapers online before the Web took off. (See this 1994 US News & World Report story and this 1993 video for more history.) But -- more to the point of Steve Yelvington's article -- my most vivid "getting news from the computer" memory from 1989 has nothing to do with a newspaper. I turned on my computer one morning in 1989 and opened the mail from my Prodigy discussion-group friends. One of them, in a pun that took me a minute to get, had introduced himself as a "semi-retired" truck driver, and we'd been chatting off and on for months. But that morning's note was news. It went something like this: "Well, a few plates fell off the shelf and the cat is pissed, but we're all o.k." That was how I learned about the 1989 San Francisco earthquake, the worst since 1906. It wasn't from the horrific TV or newspaper images of the collapsed freeway, but part of the day's conversation with someone I knew, at least a little.
That gets us back to Steve's article, titled: "A 'good enough' replacement for journalism?" He opens with a phrase from a Prodigy exec explaining the company's downfall, "OK open systems beat great closed systems every time."
The connection: "What we are seeing today, this thing that I once called 'a new kind of
people's journalism,' is colliding with traditional media in the same
way the World Wide Web hit Prodigy and CompuServe in 1994," Yelvington says.The printing press allowed documents to take the place of conversation... now the Web is merging the two again... and my students may not go looking for news as much as they just expect that anything important will just come their way -- through online contacts that are "good enough." Like Blackie's "the cat is pissed" note from San Francisco.
"To connect with the new passive majority, you need to be engaged in a broad conversation (that largely isn't about news), and professional journalism simply has not yet figured out how to do that," Steve says, posing these questions: - What does an open journalism company look like?
- How does it work?
- How can we make that open system 'good enough'?
"Because," he adds, "if traditional journalism is a closed system, it's going to be clobbered by an 'OK' open system."OK indeed... That's enough summarizing and paraphrasing to get you interested. I've left out the good parts. If you're taking my online journalism class, go read Steve's full post and think about it.
11:40:02 PM 
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