[NEohioPAL] Dismantling of the news industry

[Tom Burnett]

It didn't have to happen. If newspaper execs had been smarter a  
decade ago, they could have been sitting on top of the world today.

In the mid-1990s, the nine largest U.S. newspaper chains -- NY Times,  
Washington Post, Knight-Ridder, Gannett, Advance (the PD), Hearst,  
Times-Mirror and Cox -- formed the New Century Network to come up  
with ideas to exploit the internet. Consultants proposed ideas that  
would have pre-empted some of the biggest internet companies of  
today. A web site would have shared all their classifieds, long  
before Craig's List or Monster.com existed. There was a proposal for  
a search engine indexing and sharing their stories, long before  
Google did it. And before DoubleClick and other online ad agencies  
existed, they planned to create a common network for banner ads online.

But the companies couldn't get along well enough to launch the ideas  
the consultants proposed and the New Century Network imploded in  
1998. A Business Week story about the collapse is at:
http://www.businessweek.com/1998/12/b3570103.htm
A story from 2006 looking back at it is at:
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/06_04/b3968031.htm