Understanding the emergence of digital media

With this volume, Pablo J. Boczkowski plants the roots to approach media production from a perspective that can grasp the changes in the content industry in the Internet era. Building on the tradition of socio-technical change studies, the author traces the factors that shaped the newspaper industry exploration of electronic media in the 1980s (videotext, teletext, audiotext) and explores how three website projects of US newspapers followed sharply different paths in their definition of the Internet as a new medium. His research is a powerful antidote for the generalized technological hype that has seduced the industry and the academia for years since the Internet became the dominant solution for digital information delivery. Boczkowski tells three stories of innovation and change which demonstrate that the prophecies of interactivity, hypertext and multimedia are not a given in news websites: their development depends on organizational, economic, technological and cultural factors that vary from newsroom to newsroom.