ABSTRACT
Not so very long ago, when I was working on my dissertation in the mid-1990s, I talked with dozens of journalists about what was then a newsroom novelty: the Internet. Few of them had ever actually used it. If they wanted to find something online, they filed a request with the newsroom librarian to conduct a search for them. If they wanted to communicate with a source, they picked up the telephone; if they wanted to communicate with readers … well, to be honest, they didn’t really want to or see any particular reason why they should. And although a growing number of newspapers—around 1,500 worldwide by 1996, according to stats from trade magazine Editor & Publisher—offered some information through a computer in one form or another, my interviewees were highly unlikely to have played any part in putting it there.
