Doctoral Dissertations

Date of Award

8-1982

Degree Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy

Major

Communication

Major Professor

George Everett

Committee Members

John T. Lovell

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to examine the development of electronic newspapers in the United States, particularly the eleven electronic newspapers created for the home information retrieval project conducted from 1980-82 by the Associated Press and CompuServe.

The dissertation, which included a state-of-the-art description of videotex usage today and a lexicon of terms for the new technology, is accompanied by a four-hour videotape providing representative selections from each of the eleven newspapers participating in the project.

The primary method of data gathering was the telephone interview which was utilized to ascertain the decision making and production practices associated with the individual newspapers. From the interviews, which were conducted with either a representative of the management team at each newspaper or with the editor of the electronic edition, it was possible to create a composite picture of the typical electronic newspaper in the experiment; to create a detailed account of production practices at each of the respective newspapers^ and to ascertain the opinions of the drawbacks, benefits and prospects for videotex from eleven people who worked closely with the new medium over an extended period.

The major conclusions of the research were identifiable at both a micro— and macro-level. At the micro—level, the consensus was that the newspapers had been unimaginative and largely unsuccessful in their attempts to create a new product; at the macro-level came the realization that the new technology has the potential to eliminate geographic barriers, thereby opening the door to equalization of all information providers. The equalization factor eliminates the notion that the publisher of a newspaper is the holder of a local franchise, and replaces it with the dilemma of whether the newspaper wishes to serve a national audience or focus on a narrow public. Additionally, publishers of electronic newspapers must decide whether they want to be information providers only, in which case they are vulnerable to a host of other information providers, or if they want to become systems operators, as well, in order to control or restrict the information carried on the system.

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