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1 Philadelphia’s Newspapers Go Online (1997–2008) I n 1997, Jennifer Musser-Metz, a web producer at Philly.com, sat at her desk turning piles of raw interview tape into RealAudio files, preparing them for uploading to the World Wide Web. The interviews were by the Philadelphia Inquirer’s foreign correspondent Mark Bowden, and the subject was the American military adventure in Somalia of 1993, one of the defining episodes of the early Clinton presidency. Bowden had not yet published the book that would bear the title Black Hawk Down, and the Ridley Scott film was four years away. But as Bowden and his editors at the newspaper prepared to run a staggering twenty-nine-part series based on his reporting from Somalia, the idea was broached for a digital component that would supplement the narrative. As Bowden later recalled, “[Jennifer] stopped by my desk to ask me what sort of research material and documentation I had for the project. I had been working on it for years at that point, and had piles of audiotapes, notes, documents, radio transcripts, photos, etc. ‘Could you bring them in?’ she asked. I brought in bags of stuff, and Jennifer and the other folks at Philly.com put together a Web site.”1 Out of this pile of primary documentation, which included notes, radio transcripts , and photos, Musser-Metz—who had been granted leave from Philly.com to work with the Inquirer, which did not have an online staff—created an interactive storytelling experience, one of the first newsroom projects to tap into the digital potential of the Internet. The Blackhawk Down Internet project was something of a “one-off,” however ; an exceptional project that proves the digital rule. Although Philly.com’s digital technology team did create remarkable special projects in the early days of the web, the company as a whole spent most of the 1990s and early 2000s formulating a variety of strategies to secure its online footprint, stopping the implementation of these strategies halfway, and then trying new ones. I argue in this chapter that, while some of the difficulties in figuring out what to do online 16 Chapter 1 were logistical and organizational, just as important (though less obvious) were changing definitions of what “the journalistic public” meant during a moment of widespread digitization. For most journalists in the early online era, “the public” was a simple concept—a large collection of locally based readers who would be informed and enlightened by journalistic reportage. The key challenge of the web for news executives, editors, and journalists was to figure out how to “move” this public online in as unified a fashion as possible. The difficulty in doing so, and the manner by which the Internet started to problematize this notion of the unified journalistic public, is a key theme of this chapter. All of the various attempts to “build a newspaper website” discussed in Chapter 2 can be seen, in part, as an attempt to bring the unproblematized public online. Assembling Local News Infrastructures In Making Local News, her overview of local news production in Philadelphia, Phyllis Kaniss ties the development of local metropolitan journalism to the growth of the American city, a link that she argues has been overlooked in the majority of media research, which focuses instead on the relationship of news, national political developments, and social history.2 The transition from urban mercantile to manufacturing economies, population diversification, and geographic suburbanization each played a role in the growth of the penny press, the mass-circulation daily, and the zoned newspaper, as well as in the emergence of local radio and television. Just as Kaniss links changes in local news production to changes in the infrastructure of urban America, Chapter 2 charts the development of Philadelphia’s digital news sphere against the backdrop of changes in online technology and the growth of the Internet. By placing media changes in their digital context, we can gain one angle on the tumultuous recent history of local news production in Philadelphia.3 An analysis of the transformation of the local online news in that city can shed light on similar transformations in other American cities, where long-dominant newspapers—themselves having consolidated their monopoly positions in the aftermath of a first wave of newspaper extinctions in the 1970s—faced dozens of new entrants in the emerging digital universe. There are few serious histories of the metropolitan media and local journalism in any American city. Chapters 2 and 3...

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