Week 3 a.k.a. Newspapers: From Paper To Screens

Humans have always needed to exchange news. The earliest example of that which I can think of are messengers in Ancient Greece and Romania, whose job was to run as fast as they can and deliver news. The famous story of Pheidippides tells us about a messenger from Ancient Greece, who ran 240 kilometers in two days to request help from Spartanians, then ran back to the Greece and died shortly afterwards. The story would have never happened if they had had the Internet back then. This is Week 3 of SPEAIT2021K course and I would like to tell you about how online journalism affected traditional newspapers.

The history of newspaper goes back to the beginning of the 16th century, when first mass-produced newspapers were published. The very first newspaper, which was produced in Germany, dates back to 1605, after which numerous central European countries started publishing news in newspapers. Idea turned out to be succesful, considering we still buy and read paper-based newspapers more than 400 years later.

Over the years technology advanced and so did the ways of delivering news. August 31, 1920, first radionews program was broadcast. Twenty years later, in 1940, NBC and CBS started TV programming. In 1971, the University of Illinois started gathering electroincal texts, which later became known as Project Guthenberg and, finally, in 1976, Ceefax was launched.

Ceefax, along with its competitors Oracle and Prestel, were instances of teletext - technology, that allowed viewers to choose newsstories they wanted to read and said stories would instantly appear on the screens. Sounds familiar, doens't it? Finally, the rapid spread of the Internet in 1990s aided the appearance of online newspapers and journalism.

So, did online journalism (and blogging) affect traditional newspapers? Well, the answer is both yes and no. From influencial point of view, it did not have much effect on traditional newspapers. However, that is not the case with sales numbers. When digital newspapers emerged, many people switched to them and stopped buying paper-based news. The trend is growing and it is understood, that the day will come when traditional newspapers will become history.

Sources

• https://schools.firstnews.co.uk/blog/journalistic-writing/a-brief-history-of-news/
• https://www.medialit.org/reading-room/short-history-news
• https://www.britannica.com/topic/publishing/The-first-newspapers
• https://www.denofgeek.com/tv/the-life-and-death-of-teletext-and-what-happened-next/
• https://wiki.itcollege.ee/index.php/E-SPEAIT_T3_New_Media