
How the newspaper industry tried to invent the Web but failed. - makimaki
http://www.slate.com/id/2207912/pagenum/all/
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fallentimes
It's hard to feel bad for an industry that has done things like this:

 _"So intense was the industry's devotion to videotext and so rampant its
paranoia that some other medium would usurp its place in the media
constellation that the American Newspaper Publishers Association lobbied
Congress in 1980 to prevent AT &T from launching its own 'electronic yellow
pages.'"_

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brandnewlow
I like this part:

"Once they determined that nobody could make money from videotext and the
technology posed no threat to the newsprint model, they were happy to
shuttered their ventures."

This sounds remarkably similar to their current infatuation with Twitter. If
Twitter were to suddenly lose cache, they'd be out of there lickety split,
confident that it wasn't going to end them.

