Tuesday, January 24, 2012
Media AJC leads pack in online innovation — in 1993
Posted by Scott Henry @ScottTheHenry on Tue, Jan 24, 2012 at 5:19 PM
Remember Fastball.com? Or howzabout yall.com? No, neither do we. But they were, respectively, the AJC's Braves-dedicated website and its Southern humor website. They stem from a time when the newspaper was grappling with how to reach new audiences online. According to the Nieman article, the AJC was among the earliest papers to make a serious foray into the World Wide Web.
Here's the setup:
Not many people remember it now, but the Atlanta Journal-Constitution was one of the leading pioneers of the early Internet age. It was the first newspaper on the Prodigy Internet service — one of America Online’s two main competitors back in the early 1990s — and within 90 days of launching its Access Atlanta service, it had twice as many online subscribers, 15,000, as any other newspaper in the country.
Have you already spotted the problem? Yes, the AJC went with Prodigy, an also-ran ISP whose only lasting contribution to the Internet is arguably a Wikipedia page.
The article goes on to describe how the paper launched AccessAtlanta as a dial-up service in 1990, moved it to the ill-fated Prodigy in 1994, and finally ended up getting onto the actual WWW later than most. Now, ironically, AccessAtlanta was for years one of the nation's most popular newspaper websites. But its very popularity created a branding headache for Cox. Namely, how do you build trust in your media product when its name doesn't appear at the top of the page? So the AJC eventually turned AccessAtlanta into a generic aggregation site for entertainment news and local goings-on, directing online readers to ajc.com for actual news content.
What's the lesson to be learned? Well, none really. No matter who adopted what when, print media would likely still be sliding into the crapper, revenue-wise:
The Journal-Constitution could not predict the changes in their business that the Internet would bring about; few did. The newspaper industry failed to take advantage of Web 1.0, and a decade later, it failed to take advantage of Web 2.0, standing by as social media redefined how people learned what was happening in their communities and in the world. If large news organizations want to survive the next wave of technological change, they will need to do more than just dip their toe in the water. They will need to dive in.
Comments (2)
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The folks at the AJC should check out their sister paper's website, The Palm Beach Post, as a reminder to what a real newspaper's web presence could be......
http://www.palmbeachpost.com
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@anony - the AJC has its own in-house web staff, and at least previously all of the other Cox papers had a different, centralized design shop; I know this because I had a friend working for the latter before it was axed (I don't profess to know anything about the organization of these things beyond that). Anyway, I always used to point out to her how they did such a better job with the other papers than the AJC's POS website... it CONTINUES to be one of the worst newspaper websites I've ever seen in terms of design and navigation...
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