Early Development of News Sites in the United Kingdom and the United States in the 1990s: Exploring Trans-Atlantic Connections

The many close, trans-Atlantic connections between the United States and Britain were the setting and inspiration for much of how these nations’ respective media systems produce and consume news online today. Publishers, software engineers and journalists in both nations shared worries about the impact of the internet on the newspaper industry, and the early migration—or, in many cases, the uneven migration—to online news sites during the 1990s. This paper will explore some of those shared concerns, down to the editor and reporter level, with a special focus on the mid-to-late 1990s, and concluding with what changed by the end of that decade, and what did not. It is part of a larger study examining the internet and journalism’s initial encounters. It is based on a close reading of trade publications, memoirs, oral-history interviews and other primary-source material, and inspired by the work of Niels Brügger, with its treatment of ‘web history’ in a serious and contextualized way.

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