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3

The New World

In 1993 some journalists began to be dimly aware of something clunkily referred to as ‘the information superhighway’ but few had ever had reason to see it in action. At the start of 1995 only 491 newspapers were online worldwide: by June 1997 that had grown to some 3,600.

In the basement of the Guardian was a small team created by Peter Preston – the Product Development Unit, or PDU. The inhabitants were young and enthusiastic. None of them were conventional journalists: I think the label might be ‘creatives’. Their job was to think of new things that would never occur to the (largely middle-aged) reporters and editors three floors up.

The team – eventually rebranding itself as the New Media Lab – started casting around for the next big thing. They decided it was the internet. The creatives had a PC actually capable of accessing the world wide web. They moved in hipper circles. And they started importing copies of a new magazine, Wired – the so-called Rolling Stone of technology – which had started publishing in San Francisco in 1993, along with the HotWired website. ‘Wired described the revolution,’ it boasted. ‘HotWired was the revolution.’ It was launched in the same month the Netscape team was beginning to assemble. Only 18 months later Netscape was worth billions of dollars. Things were moving that fast.

In time, the team in PDU made friends with three of the people associated with Wired. They were the founders, Louis Rossetto and Jane Metcalfe; and the columnist, Nicholas Negroponte, who was based at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and who wrote mindblowing columns predicting such preposterous things as wristwatches which would ‘migrate from a mere timepiece today to a mobile command-and-control centre tomorrow . . . an all-in-one, wrist-mounted TV, computer, and telephone.’¹

As if.

Both Rossetto and Negroponte were, in their different ways, prophets. Rossetto was a hot booking for TV talk shows, where he would explain to baffled hosts what the information superhighway meant. He’d tell them how smart the internet was, and how ethical. Sure, it was a ‘dissonance amplifier’. But it was also a ‘driver of the discussion’ towards the real. You couldn’t mask the truth in this new world, because someone out there would weigh in with equal force. Mass media was one-way communication. The guy with the antenna could broadcast to billions, with no feedback loop. He could dominate. But on the internet every voice was going to be equal to every other voice.

‘Everything you know is wrong,’ he liked to say. ‘If you have a preconceived idea of how the world works, you’d better reconsider it.’

Negroponte, 50-something, East Coast gravitas to Rossetto’s Californian drawl, and altogether more buttoned up, was working on a book, Being Digital, and was equally passionate in his evangelism. His mantra was to explain the difference between atoms – which make up the physical artefacts of the past – and bits, which travel at the speed of light and would be the future. ‘We are so unprepared for the world of bits . . . We’re going to be forced to think differently about everything.’

I bought the drinks and listened.

Over dinner in a North London restaurant Negroponte started with convergence – the melting of all boundaries between TV, newspapers, magazines and the internet into a single media experience – and moved on to the death of copyright, possibly the nation state itself. There would be virtual reality, speech recognition, personal computers with inbuilt cameras, personalised news. The entire economic model of information was about to fall apart. The audience would pull rather than wait for old media to push things as at present. Information and entertainment would be on demand. Overly hierarchical and status-conscious societies would rapidly erode. Time as we knew it would become meaningless – five hours of music would be delivered to you in less than five seconds. Distance would become irrelevant. A UK paper would be as accessible in New York as it was in London.

I decided I should go to America and see the internet for myself.

*

It was easy, in 1993, to be only dimly aware of what the internet did. The kids in the basement might have a PC capable of accessing the web, but most of us had only read about it.

Writing 15 years later in the Observer,² the critic John Naughton compared the begetter of the world wide web, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, with the seismic disruption five centuries earlier caused by the invention of movable type. Just as Gutenberg had no conception of his invention’s eventual influence on religion, science, systems of ideas and democracy, so – in 2008 – ‘it will be decades before we have any real understanding of what Berners-Lee hath wrought’.

And so I set off to find the internet with the leader of the PDU team, Tony Ageh, a 33-year-old ‘creative’. He had had exactly one year’s experience in media – as an advertising copy chaser for The Home Organist magazine – before joining the Guardian. I took with me a copy of The Internet for Dummies. Thus armed, we set off to America for a four-day, four-city tour.

In Atlanta, we found the Atlanta Journal-Constitution (AJC), which was considered a thought leader in internet matters, having joined the Prodigy Internet Service, an online service offering subscribers information over dial-up 1,200 bit/second modems. After four months the internet service had 14,000 members, paying 10 cents a minute to access online banking, messaging, full webpage hosting and live share prices.

The AJC business plan envisaged building to 35,000 or 40,000 by year three. But that time, they calculated, they would be earning $3.3 million in subscription fees and $250,000 a year in advertising. ‘If it all goes to plan,’ David Scott, the publisher, Electronic Information Service, told us, ‘it’ll be making good money. If it goes any faster, this is a real business.’

We also met Michael Gordon, the managing editor. ‘The appeal to the management is, crudely, that it is so much cheaper than publishing a newspaper,’ he said.

We wrote it down.

‘We know there are around 100,000 people in Atlanta with PCs. There are, we think, about 1 million people wealthy enough to own them. Guys see them as a toy; women see them as a tool. The goldmine is going to be the content, which is why newspapers are so strongly placed to take advantage of this revolution. We’re out to maximise our revenue by selling our content any way we can. If we can sell it on CD-ROM or TV as well, so much the better.’

‘Papers? People will go on wanting to read them, though it’s obviously much better for us if we can persuade them to print them in their own homes. They might come in customised editions. Edition 14B might be for females living with a certain income.’

It was heady stuff.

From Atlanta we hopped up to New York to see the Times’s online service, @Times. We found an operation consisting of an editor plus three staffers and four freelancers.³ The team had two PCs, costing around $4,000 each. The operation was confident, but small.

The @Times content was weighted heavily towards arts and leisure. The opening menus offered a panel with about 15 reviews of the latest films, theatre, music and books – plus book reviews going back two years. The site offered the top 15 stories of the day, plus some sports news and business.

There was a discussion forum about movies, with 47 different subjects being debated by 235 individual subscribers. There was no archive due to the fact that – in one of the most notorious newspaper licensing cock-ups in history – the NYT in 1983 had given away all rights to its electronic archive (for all material more than 24 hours old) in perpetuity to Mead/Lexis.⁴

That deal alone told you how nobody had any clue what was to come.

We sat down with Henry E. Scott, the group director of @Times.⁵ ‘Sound and moving pictures will be next. You can get them now. I thought about it the other day, when I wondered about seeing 30 seconds of The Age of Innocence. But then I realised it would take 90 minutes to download that and I could have seen more or less the whole movie in that time. That’s going to change.’

But Scott was doubtful about the lasting value of what they were doing – at least, in terms of news. ‘I can’t see this replacing the newspaper,’ he said confidently. ‘People don’t read computers unless it pays them to, or there is some other pressing reason. I don’t think anyone reads a computer for pleasure. The San Jose Mercury has put the whole newspaper online. We don’t think that’s very sensible. It doesn’t make sense to offer the entire newspaper electronically.’

We wrote it all down.

‘I can’t see the point of news on screen. If I want to know about a breaking story I turn on the TV or the radio. I think we should only do what we can do better than in print. If it’s inferior than the print version there’s no point in doing it.’

Was there a business plan? Not in Scott’s mind. ‘There’s no way you can make money out of it if you are using someone else’s server. I think the LA Times expects to start making money in about three years’ time. We’re treating it more as an R & D project.’

This approach became known as ‘reach before revenue’. It was the business model for much of the internet.

From New York we flitted over to Chicago to see what the Tribune was up to. In its 36-storey Art Deco building – a spectacular monument to institutional self-esteem – we found a team of four editorial and four marketing people working on a digital service, with the digital unit situated in the middle of the newsroom. The marketeers were beyond excited about the prospect of being able to show houses or cars for sale and arranged a demonstration. We were excited, too, even if the pictures were slow and cumbersome to download.

We met Joe Leonard, associate editor. ‘We’re not looking at Chicago Online as a money maker. We’ve no plans even to break even at this stage. My view is simply that I’m not yet sure where I’m going, but I’m on the boat, in the water – and I’m ahead of the guy who is still standing on the pier.’

Reach before revenue.

Finally we headed off to Boulder, Colorado, in the foothills of the Rockies, where Knight Ridder had a team working on their vision of the newspaper of tomorrow. The big idea was, essentially, what would become the iPad – only the team in Boulder hadn’t got much further than making an A4 block of wood with a ‘front page’ stuck on it. The 50-something director of the research centre, Roger Fidler, thought the technology capable of realising his dream of a ‘personal information appliance’ was a couple of years off.⁶

Tony and I had filled several notebooks. We were by now beyond tired and talked little over a final meal in an Italian restaurant beneath the Rocky Mountains.

We had come. We had seen the internet. We were conquered.

*

Looking back from the safe distance of nearly 25 years it’s easy to mock the fumbling, wildly wrong predictions about where this new beast was going to take the news industry. We had met navigators and pioneers. They could dimly glimpse where the future lay. Not one of them had any idea how to make a dime out of it, but at the same time they intuitively sensed that it would be more reckless not to experiment. It seemed reasonable to assume that – if they could be persuaded to take the internet seriously – their companies would dominate in this new world, as they had in the old world.

We were no different. After just four days it seemed blindingly obvious that the future of information would be mainly digital. Plain old words on paper – delivered expensively by essentially Victorian production and distribution methods – couldn’t, in the end, compete. The future would be more interactive, more image-driven, more immediate. That was clear. But how on earth could you graft a digital mindset and processes onto the stately ocean liner of print? How could you convince anyone that this should be a priority when no one had yet worked out how to make any money out of it? The change, and therefore the threat, was likely to happen rapidly and maybe violently. How quickly could we make a start? Or was this something that would be done to us?

In a note for Peter Preston on our return I wrote, ‘The internet is fascinating, intoxicating . . . it is also crowded out with bores, nutters, fanatics and middle managers from Minnesota who want the world to see their home page and CV. It’s a cacophony, a jungle. There’s too much information out there. We’re all overloaded. You want someone you trust to fillet it, edit it and make sense of it for you. That’s what we do. It’s an opportunity.’

I spent the next year trying to learn more and then the calendar clicked on to 1995 – The Year the Future Began, at least according to a recent book by the cultural historian W. Joseph Campbell, who used the phrase as his book title twenty years later. It was the year of O.J. Simpson, the Dayton Ohio peace accord and the entanglement of Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky. It was the year Amazon.com, eBay, Craigslist and Match.com established their presence online. Microsoft spent $300m launching Windows 95 with weeks of marketing hype, spending millions for the rights to the Rolling Stones hit ‘Start Me Up’, which became the anthem for the Windows 95 launch.

Cyberspace – as the cyber dystopian Evgeny Morozov recalled, looking back on that period – felt like space itself.⁷ ‘The idea of exploring cyberspace as virgin territory, not yet colonised by governments and corporations, was romantic; that romanticism was even reflected in the names of early browsers (“Internet Explorer,” “Netscape Navigator”).’

But, as Campbell was to reflect, ‘no industry in 1995 was as ill-prepared for the digital age, or more inclined to pooh-pooh the disruptive potential of the Internet and World Wide Web, than the news business’. It suffered from what he called ‘innovation blindness’ – ‘an inability, or a disinclination to anticipate and understand the consequences of new media technology’.

1995 was, then, the year the future began. It happened also to be the year in which I became editor of the Guardian.