BOB GARFIELD: The future of newspapers is obviously anybody’s guess, but not for want of thinking about it.
[CLIP]:
FEMALE CORRESPONDENT: Imagine, if you will, sitting down to your morning coffee, turning on your home computer to read the day’s newspaper. Well, it’s not as farfetched as it may seem. In fact –
[VOICE TRAILS OFF]
[END CLIP]
BOB GARFIELD: It’s a YouTube clip that has been streamed by more than a half million people, a 1981 news feature on San Francisco’s local TV channel, KRON.
[CLIP]:
[FEMALE CORRESPONDENT TALKING]
MALE CORRESPONDENT: Seventeen stories up, in his fashionable North Beach apartment, Richard Halloran is calling a local number that will connect him with a computer in Columbus, Ohio.
[END CLIP]
BOB GARFIELD: The piece, by reporter Steve Newman, took a bemused look at a San Francisco Examiner experiment in delivering the day’s paper on their newfangled [LAUGHS] home computer machines. All you do is dial your - dial telephone, stuff the receiver into the rubber-gasketed foam coupler, endure a series of screechy modem tones, and two hours later, voila, all the day’s text appears on your TV, n a display with all the color and pizzazz - of an ATM screen. [LAUGHS] It’s so quaint and primitive! [LAUGHS] How stupid and oddly clothed all those people from the past were, oh, and also eerily prescient about the issues that would define the newspaper industry three creates later. Here was an Examiner editor named David Cole.
[CLIP]:
DAVID COLE: This is an experiment. We're trying to figure out what it’s going to mean to us as editors and reporters and what it means to the home user. And – and we're not in it to make money. We're probably not going to lose a lot but we aren't going to make much, either.
[END CLIP]
BOB GARFIELD: Pretty much nails it. The only details he failed to foresee were Craigslist – and the collapse of the entire business model. On the technology side though, even the TV guy connected the dot matrix dots.
[CLIP]:
MALE CORRESPONDENT: This is only the first step in newspapers by computer. Engineers now predict the day will come when we get all our newspapers and magazines by home computer, but that’s a few years off. So, for the moment at least –
[VOICE TRAILS OFF]
[END CLIP]
BOB GARFIELD: Yep, online magazines, it happened. That, and just a touch of apocalypse.
[MUSIC UP AND UNDER]
[CLIP]:
FEMALE CORRESPONDENT: Well, it takes over two hours to receive the entire text of the newspaper over the phone, and with an hourly use charge of five dollars, the new telepaper won't be much competition for the 20-cent street edition.
[END CLIP]
[MUSIC UP AND UNDER]
BOB GARFIELD: That's it for this week's show. On the Media was produced by Jamie York, Mike Vuolo, Mark Phillips, Nazanin Rafsanjani, Michael Bernstein and P.J. Vogt, with more help from Kara Gionfriddo and Ethan Chiel, and edited – by Brooke. We had technical direction from Jennifer Munson and more engineering help from Zach Marsh. Our webmaster is Amy Pearl.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Katya Rogers is our senior producer and John Keefe our executive producer. Bassist/composer Ben Allison wrote our theme. This is On the Media from WNYC. I'm Brooke Gladstone.
BOB GARFIELD: And I'm Bob Garfield.