2.3 World Wide Web
Two other types of videotex were Bulletin Boards and Consumer Online Services but it took yet another type – the World Wide Web – to cause a real breakthrough in the industry. Originally, computers weren’t envisioned to turn into a communication medium. But once they started being interconnected, the new possibilities became evident (Dimitrova&Neznanski, 2006).
At first the Internet was used solely for military and academic purposes but once the graphical Mosaic Web-browser was developed in 1993, the wider audience could also access the Internet. An annual growth rate for Mosaic in that year was estimated to be just under 350% – quite a success story, quickly picked up by newspapers and journalists.
In the same year the first journalism website was launched by the University of Florida College of Journalism and Communications. Palo Alto Weekly was reportedly the first newspaper to publish on the Web twice weekly and entirely for free (Carlson, 2003).
The real boom happened in 1995 as the American government dropped the prohibition of advertising online, enabling revenue flow from online activities. Also, more and more households were getting connected to the Web.
The number of newspapers with online presence was increasing every day, and “the Newspaper Association of America reported the following April [in 1995] that 775 newspapers were on the Web worldwide, 175 of them in North America” (Carlson, p.51).
Ever since then only more and more newspapers decided to start publishing their content online.
The idea of accessing news sites online proved to be very successful. After only two years of online presence, the Guardian Unlimited had 2.4 million unique users in 2001. This meant that the website became the most popular newspaper website in the UK (Meek, 2006).
