Delivering The Fax
THE SPECIAL EDITION OF THE ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH THAT MADE ITS debut on December 7, 1938, should have been a colossal failure. The Pulitzer-owned paper carried no advertising and earned no money at the newsstand; in fact only 15 copies were printed. It contained no memorable scoops, just stories like a front-page article reporting the arrest of one Albert Button “after Mrs. Viola Buck, a confectionery owner, had told police he had spoken to her of the dire consequences which might result from her identification of three men accused of holding her up on Nov. 11.”
But the new edition was hailed as a grand success, both inside the paper and elsewhere. A Paramount newsreel shown in 6,000 theaters nationwide and in 20 foreign countries featured a story on it. President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s son Elliott pronounced it “a very good advertising medium.”
The remarkable thing about the paper wasn’t its content but its delivery. The copies weren’t sold on street corners or thrown onto subscribers’ front porches; they weren’t even produced at a printing plant. The newspapers arrived by radio.
The Post-Dispatch owned radio station KSD, which transmitted a signal on an experimental ultra-high frequency comprehensible only to 15 special radio receivers, located in the homes of staff members, that were equipped with built-in printers. Starting December 7, they each printed a copy of the Post-Dispatch ’s nine-page “Radio Edition” on a roll of paper eight and a half inches wide every afternoon at two o’clock. These editions—featuring pages of news, sports scores, radio program schedules, an editorial cartoon, and stock quotes—were scanned and broadcast from KSD’s studios. They were facsimiles of an original hard copy, what we would today call a fax.
In the minds of its corporate backers, the government, and the general public, broadcast facsimile (or the radio newspaper, as it was commonly known) was likely to become as much of a part of American life as the radio had become and television soon would. The day seemed near when late-breaking facsimile bulletins delivered over the airwaves would be printed hourly in every home. And who knew? Perhaps in the future the local paperboy would be looking for a new line of work.
An article in the December 1937 issue of Current History noted President Roosevelt’s prediction that average citizens would soon be receiving their morning papers at home via facsimile. “The radio newspaper is here,” trumpeted the author, W. Carroll Munro, painting a vivid picture of the near future. “Imagine a family at home preparing for breakfast. From a small cabinet, attractively designed and operating automatically through a time-clock connection with an ordinary radio set, unfolds a wide ribbon of paper. Tearing off a strip the master of the house exclaims: ‘Sweetheart, take a gander at this! Last night the Secret Service uncovered the fact that our Secretary of State is really a member of the British royal family. Whew! What a mess!’ But ‘sweetheart’ is already occupied with a few radio newspaper columns of her own, getting a peek at an illustrated advertisement describing the breath-taking bargains in fur coats at the favorite department store.”
There were skeptics, of course. “Like television, the ‘radio newspaper’ has hung just around the corner for many years,” commented Business Week in May 1937, “and the popular scientists who write for the Sunday supplements have been busy alternately apologizing for its delay and heralding anew its imminent reality.” Still, in the 1930s and 1940s more than 20 radio stations around the country made facsimile broadcasts, usually transmitting abridged versions of local newspapers. The New York Times , the Sacramento Bee , the Chicago Tribune , and the Miami Herald all published daily editions transmitted by facsimile, in some cases several times a day.
The nation’s largest broadcaster, the Radio Corporation of America, toyed with facsimile publishing, supplying the equipment for the Post-Dispatch ’s broadcasts and showcasing it alongside television at the 1939 New York world’s fair. When RCA’s president, David Sarnoff, previewed the future of broadcasting at a 1940 shareholders’ meeting, he saw facsimile. “Three new services now beckon those who seek to expand radio’s usefulness,” he told the company’s shareholders. “They are: Facsimile, frequency modulation [FM] and television.” But despite all this promise, a dozen years later facsimile broadcasting had all but disappeared. The radio newspaper, a medium that at one time seemed destined to be a major force in Americans’ lives, became irrelevant and was soon forgotten.
Facsimile transmission—sending a fixed image from a source to a receiver—was patented in 1843 by the Scottish electrician and clockmaker Alexander Bain. Bain’s system bore little resemblance to today’s fax machines in that it didn’t transmit ordinary writing on a sheet of paper. Instead it re-created a pattern formed with raised metal blocks in a wooden frame. In 1865 Giovanni Caselli launched the first commercial facsimile service, a link between Paris and Lyons. The Paris-Lyons system was a bit more modern, employing messages written with insulating varnish on metal foil.
Fax required such specially constructed originals until 1902, when Dr. Arthur Korn demonstrated in Germany the first practical system for transmitting photographs using a selenium-based lightsensitive scanner. Five years later he launched a commercial picture-transmission service, and by the 1920s the process had caught on in the United States. In a 1924 test, RCA transmitted a photo of Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes by radio from New York to London and back again. The link went commercial two years later. AT&T launched its Wirephoto service in 1925 by sending photographs of President Calvin Coolidge’s inauguration ceremonies from Washington to New York, Chicago, and San Francisco.
Meanwhile, broadcasters in the young field of commercial radio had begun working with facsimile. The Newark, New Jersey, radio station WOR, owned by the Bamberger department store, started sending photographs via fax in 1926. It used the “Rayfoto” system created a few years earlier by Austin Cooley, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology dropout. The station abandoned the Cooley system two years later; it was unsuitable for widespread home use because the receiver relied on photographic paper that had to be chemically developed.
Other inventors, though, latched on to the idea of sending facsimile to the home the way broadcasters were transmitting audio programs to living-room radios. One of them was William George Harold Finch. Finch was born in Birmingham, England, in 1897 and emigrated to the United States with his family as a child. Interested in communications from an early age, he studied engineering and found work as an engineer for the Hearst-owned International News Service (INS). In the early 1920s he began to experiment with facsimile transmission; the energetic inventor eventually obtained more than 200 patents in facsimile and other aspects of electronics.
Finch left Hearst in 1934 to spend a year as the assistant chief engineer of the newly formed Federal Communications Commission. When he launched his own company in 1935 to research, and later to manufacture, facsimile equipment for military, commercial, and consumer applications, INS was one of his first clients.
By the late 1930s Finch had developed a rugged and inexpensive facsimile process that captured the attention of hobbyists and was brought to market. It was an updated version of the pendulum-based invention that Bain had devised a century before. Text, drawings, and photographs were printed on a piece of paper four inches wide, which was fed through a transmitter at the rate of one inch per minute. A metal-stylus pendulum swung back and forth across the paper as it passed through the transmitter; on its tip were a tiny spotlight and a photoelectric cell that read the reflection of the light off the paper’s surface. When it passed over a light spot on the paper, it generated a different signal than when it passed over the dark ink of text or a picture. As the roll of paper moved through the machine, the pendulum traced 100 horizontal lines per inch over the image and converted each horizontal strip of the original image into an electrical signal that could be sent over the air to a facsimile receiver.
To help visualize this process—taking the image, dividing it into horizontal strips, and using those strips to reassemble the image elsewhere—imagine a stack of playing cards with a word written on the side of the deck. Looking at the cards one by one, it’s impossible to discern any meaning from the spots of ink on the edge of each card. But reassemble all 52 cards in the proper order, and the ink on each of the cards will add up to form the word.
The receiver used a special black paper with a white chemical coating where Cooley had used photographic paper. A pendulum swung back and forth across the paper and. corresponding to light and dark areas of the original, burned through the white coating to reveal the dark surface underneath.
Finch’s system was limited by its glacial slowness—11 minutes to send a page as tall as a sheet of typewriter paper and only half as wide. But priced at $79.50 (or $49.95 for those brave enough to attempt a do-it-yourself kit), Finch’s system was considerably less expensive than RCA’s receivers, which by the company’s own estimate would cost $260 apiece. Both industry and the general public took notice of Finch.
In the late thirties several stations around the country started broadcasting with Finch’s process. WOR bought 25 receiving machines from Finch and 25 from RCA in 1937. Late at night, when its usual station programming was off the air, it broadcast facsimile instead—press releases and publicity photos, for example. Cincinnati’s WLW gained nationwide publicity in July 1939 by broadcasting aerial photos of a devastating flood in Morehead, Kentucky. WOR, WLW, and Chicago’s WGN collaborated on tests, taking turns for their nightly broadcasts so that the few people who owned facsimile receivers or had them on loan could compare transmission quality. Because facsimile signals could be recorded just like music, the stations put facsimile programs on disks and shared them with one another, so the same program could be broadcast by all three.
Finch soon won the support of Powel Crosley, a maverick radio marketer and the owner of the Cincinnati Reds. Crosley, who also owned WLW, had already pushed the limits of broadcasting by boosting the station’s power so high that it could be heard as far away as the Arctic Ocean. He licensed the Finch system and manufactured it briefly, starting in 1939. He dubbed the home facsimile printer, which connected to a radio, the Reado, and he displayed it at the world’s fair along with other technological innovations.
It’s unclear, though, how much faith Crosley had in the Reado. In trade presentations to appliance dealers, reported the industry magazine Broadcasting , “the manufacturer is careful to make no prophecy as to the commercial future of this item.” In fact, “the receiver was presented primarily as a display attraction that would bring people into the stores of Crosley dealers.” At this, it was a success. A Crosley employee reported that a facsimile receiver on view in a Cincinnati hotel attracted so many people that, three weeks after its debut, ushers were still necessary to handle the crowds.
While some newspapers, like the Post-Dispatch , embraced the new technology, others were suspicious. Newspaper publishers “quite logically see in facsimile reproduction an arch-competitor,” wrote Business Week . “There will be a fight to the death.” But in the years before World War II the fight never even began. Facsimile didn’t progress much beyond the testing stage, though in the late 1930s 15 conventional AM stations and 22 experimental highfrequency stations received FCC permission to test facsimile broadcasts. By the time the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor in 1941, only 4 were still broadcasting.
One company that gave up on facsimile was the McClatchy newspaper and radio chain, owner of the Sacramento Bee and the Fresno Bee . The problem was time. The RCA system took more than 18 minutes to send a single page. “Speed it up,” said McClatchy’s general manager, Guy C. Hamilton, at an industry gathering, “give a larger page size, make it more automatic, make it easier to read … and the chances are the American public will accept it.”
Despite its shortcomings, Hamilton, like Crosley, found facsimile to be a useful publicity tool. It cost McClatchy $75,000 to publish a facsimile newspaper from February to December 1939, but according to Hamilton, “Our money came back to us in nationwide publicity, which made it easier for our salesmen to reach key men in agencies and industries from whom we expect advertising.”
During World War II, facsimile development was put on hold. With wartime restrictions limiting broadcasting, the FCC withdrew its licenses for the high-frequency operations that some stations were using for facsimile, and the work on conventional AM channels went by the wayside. WOR had broadcast fax between 1:00 A.M. and 6:00 A.M. but switched to 24-hour-a-day audio broadcasting in order to report war news. RCA gave up on facsimile broadcast altogether, and Finch’s company switched gears to manufacture systems that could be used to send weather data and reconnaissance photos for the government.
But toward the war’s close, facsimile was revived, thanks to an industry venture called Broadcasters Faximile Analysis. BFA was backed by 20 North American broadcasters, most affiliated with major newspapers, such as The New York Times , the Washington Post , the Philadelphia Inquirer , and the Cleveland Plain Dealer . They joined together to finance research and development in facsimile conducted by a rival of Finch, John Vincent Lawless Hogan.
Best known as the founder of WQXR, New York City’s leading classical music station, Hogan had already enjoyed a long and storied career in radio. He was born into considerably greater privilege than Finch and educated in private schools in New York and New Haven. As a teenager he had worked as a lab assistant to the radio pioneer Lee de Forest, who had, not coincidentally, received financial backing from his father. In his early twenties Hogan invented a simplified mechanism for tuning a radio receiver, one that used only a single dial. He was cofounder of the Institute of Radio Engineers and later served as its president. In the 1920s he secured an experimental license for a New York City station, W2XR, over which he conducted tests of a television broadcasting system and later of facsimile. He relaunched it in 1936 as a commercial station, WQXR, and sold it to The New York Times in 1944.
BFA was formed in the fall of 1944, when WOR’s president, Theodore Streibert, approached Hogan about jumpstarting a facsimile revival. Hogan, who had stayed on as WQXR’s president after selling the station, was also running a separate research firm called Radio Inventions. Streibert’s goal, as he explained later, was to get facsimile in front of the public as soon as possible “so as to determine the type of service and editorial content most useful to the public in home broadcasting.”
Streibert may not have been sure what material would end up in recipients’ homes, but pre-war and postwar facsimile broadcasts from different stations around the country all fitted the same pattern. What arrived in people’s homes looked like a shorter version of a newspaper, with a mix of late-breaking news, features, cartoons, sporting results, and stock quotes.
In the 1930s technological optimists predicted that facsimile newspapers would replace conventional ones, but given the printing speed, paper size, and other limitations of facsimile, most experts thought the new system would be an extension of the daily paper, not an alternative to it. In this context the key advantage of facsimile was the quickness with which news could travel from the newsroom to the home. “It could broadcast news reports too late for morning newspaper publication,” said A. H. Kirchhofer, managing editor of the Buffalo Evening News , in 1936, and “… the public could receive late news bulletins, especially prepared for facsimile transmission, at hours best suited to supplement newspaper service.”
But why facsimile? If the idea is to supply a news bulletin, wouldn’t an audio broadcast suffice? It didn’t seem that simple a half-century ago. A recurring theme in reports on facsimile broadcasting was the inadequacy of radio news. In the eyes of facsimile boosters, most of whom were in the newspaper business, people wanted their news in tangible form. As it turned out, they were wrong. Between 1950 and 1997 the number of evening papers decreased from 1,450 to 816, and circulation dropped by more than two-thirds, primarily because of television.
The predicted discomfort with electronic, transitory news in the era of facsimile broadcasting was a testament to the nation’s newspaper habit and the radio medium’s relative youth. Consider this passage from the Current History article: “… in evaluating the radio as an entity critics state that at present it violates the basic laws of knowledge—permanent record and continuity. For, in the history of humanity it is never the spoken word, the mouth to mouth method of communication still practised by many backward tribes, but rather the inscribed tablet embodying the written word that has builded column by column the knowledge to which we now have access. But if this is the criticism suffered by radio in the past, competent people say that facsimile broadcast will make it invalid in the future.”
A decade later other commentators praised facsimile for its practical benefits, though they fell short of asserting that it separated civilization from savages. “With facsimile [the user] can always reread words, phrases, and sentences that are not clear at first glance and, if received in an unrecorded voice broadcast, could never be clarified,” wrote Charles R. Jones in a 1949 book devoted to facsimile.
For the homemaker, “facsimile has a marked advantage over radio,” wrote Lee Hills and Timothy J. Sullivan, editors at the Miami Herald , in another book published in 1949. “There is no chance of misunderstanding a complicated recipe or fashion tip. Facsimile prints the full details, right in the home, with no possibility of error.”
Boosters saw yet another advantage to facsimile: freedom. Facsimile “releases you from your radio set; you do not have to be within hearing or sight of your receiver while the news is coming in,” wrote Hogan in the foreword to Hills and Sullivan’s book. This convenience appealed to broadcasters too. “Radio broadcasters have always felt handicapped because their programs could be effectively received only when listeners were giving their attention to their radio sets,” wrote WOR’s vice president, John R. Poppele, in 1946. “We have missed the ability to leave a record in the home, which could get attention at a time later than the broadcast itself.”
Finally, the newspapers considering facsimile broadcast were motivated by fear. They weren’t sure whether they could make money from this new medium, but they ventured in anyway because they were afraid of missing out on something big. “I do not know what facsimile is any more than I knew what radio was 20 years ago, but we are going to find out all about it,” said Col. Robert R. McCormick, editor and publisher of the Chicago Tribune , when the paper launched a fax edition in 1946. “There is no doubt that radio is constantly developing. FM, television, facsimile are all new. We can’t resist these advances. We’ve got to go with them.”
A month earlier, in the same issue that covered BFA’s first major public announcement of its efforts, an editorial in Editor & Publisher expressed a similar view: “We think it has possibilities as a supplement to newspaper publication. We trust publishers will explore its possibilities and, if found worthy, adopt it as an adjunct of their business rather than ‘miss the boat’ as they did earlier with radio and wake up to find it a well established and strong competitor.”
Exactly how facsimile would operate as a business was unclear. It was expected that the publisher of a facsimile paper would be able to charge for display advertising, but no one publicly discussed rates or speculated on how much advertising a home reader could tolerate. Charging a subscription fee wasn’t considered an option at the time. Consumers would presumably buy the facsimile reception hardware, but predicted costs varied widely.
Streibert, like some other broadcasters, believed that facsimile’s acceptance in the market would be improved by better technology: faster printing speeds, higher-quality reproduction, and simpler operation of home receivers. BFA’s backers ponied up more than $10,000 each, giving Hogan a $250,000 budget to perfect a system. The machines BFA unveiled in 1946 printed an image a little more than 8 inches wide—enough space for four newspaper columns. The system could transmit four llVa-inch pages in 15 minutes.
And so in the late 1940s, BFA broadcasters launched a series of facsimile demonstrations, using the equipment designed by Hogan and manufactured by General Electric. Their goal was to build public interest and learn for themselves how to create a facsimile newspaper. They placed machines in a limited number of homes and, more visibly, in department stores and other public places.
The most extensive operation was the Miami Herald ’s, which published a facsimile paper for about a year starting in 1948. Seven people worked to create and transmit the four to five facsimile editions that the Herald put out each weekday. An editor pulled stories from the conventionally printed paper, laid out the fax edition, and wrote headlines and captions. Front-page stories were brief and usually covered late-breaking news. A scanner operator made sure that the original was being transmitted properly. A staff engineer made house calls for the frequently faulty receivers. (Even putting blank paper into the machine required skill, because each roll was moist with the chemicals that the printing system required.) The staff also included two typists, an art director, and a copy boy/general assistant. The operation cost the Herald $2,000 a month.
The Philadelphia Inquirer and The New York Times also had fax editions in 1948. The Times published fourpage bulletins six times a day, transmitting them primarily to department stores around New York City. Zaven N. Masoomian, a WQXR engineer at the time, remembers making the rounds of stores like B. Altman and Lord & Taylor to make sure the machines were functioning properly. The quality of print, he recalls, was similar to that of today’s thermal printer fax machines: soft and fuzzy around the edges but legible.
Facsimile finally appeared to be getting taken seriously. In an account of the Times effort, The New Yorker wrote respectfully, “The facsimile newspaper, or ‘fax,’ as it is beginning to be called … may someday be a standard object in every well-appointed home.” The University of Missouri’s school of journalism launched its own daily facsimile newspaper in 1948, and the University of Miami offered classes on fax newspaper production. In March 1948 the FCC held three days of hearings over standards for facsimile broadcasts, and they were covered extensively in the trade press. Three months later the commission set rules for commercial facsimile broadcasts. Newspaper publishers like the Herald ’s John S. Knight worried enough about the future of facsimile to spend time and ink arguing that newspapers transmitted over the broadcast spectrum should enjoy the same First Amendment freedoms as newspapers, without the editorial restrictions the FCC placed on radio.
Despite all this, facsimile was on the wane. The New York Times tried to sell its transmitters almost as soon as it finished its one-month, $10,000 public demonstration, but it couldn’t find any takers. The paper’s publisher, Arthur H. Sulzberger, received a memo informing him that an associate of Hogan named Elliott Crooks had tried unsuccessfully to sell the facsimile sets to the New York Daily News , CBS, and Life magazine. “Mr. Crooks was quite frank and said he has no new ideas about how we could use facsimile,” the memo said.
The Times wasn’t the only broadcaster that had turned pessimistic. At least half the companies that had financed Hogan’s work and ordered equipment shelved it in 1948 and 1949. A few years earlier it had been conceivable that facsimile and television, both the stuff of experimental broadcasts, might be equally important, but by the end of the 1940s television, and only television, had captured the hearts of the American people (as it would subsequently capture the dollars of advertisers). “Facsimile publishers feel that, after the novelty of a television set wears off, it has merely a share of the set owner’s attention, not a monopoly,” wrote the Herald ’s Hills and Sullivan. “Newspapers and magazines, movies and radio have lived side by side and prospered; facsimile and television can do likewise.” But the novelty of television never wore off. Between 1949 and 1950 television advertising revenues tripled from $34.3 million to $105.9 million. And the growth never stopped. “Television business prospects for 1952 are almost fantastically rosy,” Broadcasting reported. In 1951 the number of television sets in use leaped from 9.8 million to nearly 15 million. It was clear that there was money to be made in television. The same could not be said of facsimile.
Facsimile faded fast, and by March 1951 Hogan was reduced to helping college students send information about road conditions to participants in the “Farm and Home Week” program at Cornell University.
Finch had his own difficulties. In the summer of 1949 his company, Finch Telecommunications Laboratories, had gotten into a dispute over its contract to build facsimile equipment for the Army Signal Corps. By 1952 it was bankrupt. Meanwhile, he had been working for the Navy since 1940, eventually attaining the rank of captain. He retired in 1957 as director of patents in the Office of Naval Research and remained an active inventor until his death in 1990. Hogan had died 30 years earlier.
Their dreams of facsimile’s popularity came true, of course, but many years after they hoped and in a form they never imagined. Fax machines remained in limited use until the 1980s, when the fax took off thanks to technological improvements, changes in telephone regulations, and the creation of standards guaranteeing that machines manufactured by one company could communicate with those made by others. Today it is a ubiquitous piece of office equipment, though unlike Finch’s and Hogan’s systems, it relies on a telephone network instead of radio and can both send and receive.
And the idea of sending a newspaper by facsimile is not dead. Since 1990 The New York Times has published an abridged version of the paper, called Times fax, that it transmits worldwide. It is faxed daily to resorts and cruise ships, where it’s photocopied and handed out. Fifty years ago facsimile seemed like a good way to deliver international news locally; today the Times Fax service extends the reach of a local paper internationally.
Still, it is in the rise of the Internet that the promise of facsimile newspapers seems to have been fulfilled. Fifty years after facsimile’s failure, breaking news is available in the home, in written form, via the Internet. People don’t have to be glued to a TV or radio to get the news, because it will be ready for them on the Internet when they want it.
Internet access from the home is likely more expensive than a facsimile newspaper would be today, given the relative costs of computers and fax machines. But aside from the Internet’s overall usefulness, on-line news sites improve on the facsimile newspaper concept in several ways. Instead of reading the same news broadcast sent to every other subscriber, people can visit whatever news sites they like or sign up for e-mail bulletins from the news providers they prefer. They can focus on the subjects that interest them and read daily papers from countries on the other side of the planet.
The parallels between today’s Internet news site and yesterday’s facsimile newspaper don’t stop with the features readers might notice. They extend to the strategic issues faced by newspapers confronted by a new medium. In the 1930s and 1940s publishers saw a new technology arise and wondered whether it was friend or foe. As the possibilities of on-line services and the Internet became clear earlier in this decade, newspapers wondered the same thing. “Newspapers saw the Web as an opportunity and a challenge to their current business,” says Randy Bennett, vice president of electronic media for the Newspaper Association of America. The issue that news organizations faced then and continue to face, Bennett says, is whether they can use the Web to protect and strengthen their core product—the printed newspaper—and at the same time build a new product that may have greater growth potential. David Easterly, president of Cox Newspapers, told The Quill magazine at the close of 1993, “As journalism … is going to be practiced in the 21st century, there’s a real question about who’s going to own it, whether it’s the Coxes, Gannetts and the New York Times , or whether it’s H&R Block [CompuServe’s then parent] and Microsoft. So my view is at this point, we need to get really busy proving we can put compelling services up on electronic platforms.”
While the fax newspaper failed in part because few print newspapers embraced it, the Internet is being integrated into the mass media with surprising ease. According to the Pew Research Center, 4 percent of adults went on-line at least once a week for news in 1995; in 1998 the number was up to 20 percent. In 1994, Bennett reports, about 50 U.S. daily newspapers were on-line; on the Web today are nearly 900 of the 1,500 daily papers in the nation.
But one more parallel between yesterday and today remains. Companies believe they’ll make money from the new medium, but for the most part they don’t know exactly how. “They’re still unsure about what the right economic model is to succeed in this new business,” Bennett says. Already newspapers have hit some dead ends. New Century Network, a consortium of some of the nation’s biggest papers, set up a Web site to aggregate stories—or at least advertising—but shut it down. The San Jose Mercury News tried charging for complete access to its Web site but gave up. Slate , an on-line magazine, saw its readership drop from more than 200,000 to less than 30,000 in the months after it began charging a subscription fee. Classified and display advertising, important sources of revenue, will likely grow but aren’t yet profitable. Meanwhile, newspapers have introduced other Net-related businesses, such as hosting Web sites for local firms, selling print and on-line ads in a package deal, and providing dial-up Internet connections to subscribers for a monthly fee.
How the Internet will ultimately develop for newspapers and other news organizations remains unclear, but the prospects are exciting nonetheless. The words John V. L. Hogan wrote 50 years ago seem relevant today, even if the technology they refer to has changed. “The potentialities of the facsimile newspaper are so great that they should be studied by all who are concerned with modern radio and journalism,” Hogan wrote. “To foresee and to catalogue all the implications of having a radio-controlled miniature printing press in every home of the nation would indeed require a bolder and better mind than mine.”
