Digitizing the News: Innovation in Online Newspapers

Digitizing the News: Innovation in Online Newspapers. Pablo J. Boczkowski. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004. 243 pp. $30 hbk. The most daunting job in academia at present must be to write a book about the Internet. Those of us who "live" in cyberland are an unruly lot given to quick criticism in the sarcastic tone of online "flaming." But more important, almost anything written about the digital world will be out of date before it makes it through the book-publishing process. My hat is off to Boczkowski, however. While Digitizing the News dwells too long on a few issues that are several nanoseconds beyond their prime, this business professor from MIT has laid a substantial offering at the feet of journalism. Digitizing the News is a good read from both the theoretical and practical viewpoints. Pablo Boczkowski is the Cecil and Ida Green Career Development Assistant Professor of Organizational Studies at the MIT Sloan School of Management. He earned psychology degrees in his native Argentina, then both a master's and a doctorate in science and technology from Cornell. He combines the fields to study how new media technology affects work practices, communications processes, and interaction with consumers, especially in fields traditionally dominated by print media. In this, his first book, Boczkowski uses sometimes cold business-school logic to remove the mystery from the adoption of digital techniques by the news media. But there is a certain impish mirth and humanity in Boczkowski's writing that makes this an attractive story. The author demonstrates that, rather than arising as a Harry Potteresque phantasm conjured in a Silicon Valley garage, online media developed in stages to meet legitimate needs of both news consumer and news producer. The metaphor that Boczkowski uses to explain this development is the hardy pioneer who brought civilization to the Americas. Like the New World, the New Media first required a period of exploration by the brash adventurers before the farmer-types would risk settling. Boczkowski's explanation of the exploration phenomenon leaves the reader with a much clearer understanding of why we were pelted with teletext, audiotext, and other digital fads that failed commercially, but moved us along the path to a cyber future. The failure of earlier techniques was not a series of mistakes but the logical narrowing of technological exploration in preparation for "settling." In this case, there was more than one type of settling; the industry settled its argument on what type of technology to use by migrating to the Web, and the major players in the media began staking claims and building spreads on the virgin territory of the Internet. …