![]() The AJC and Cox had enough clout within the news industry for their executives to be able to persuade other papers, including the Los Angeles Times and Newsday, to make similar deals with Prodigy.Īnd they had enough clout for a Cox executive, Peter Winter, to become the interim CEO of the New Century Network, the industry’s abortive 1995 attempt to form a web cartel and control access to their journalism. The Journal-Constitution had a number of smart people pushing it forward, including director of information services Chris Jennewein, who left Atlanta to perform a similar role at the Mercury-News, and webmaster Chad Dickerson, who is now the CEO of Etsy. The Merc started out on AOL but quickly abandoned it to build its own website, Mercury Center, which quickly became one of the indispensable sites for Silicon Valley - but then crested and cratered along with the rest of the newspaper industry. In some ways, the Journal-Constitution’s digital rise and fall mirrors that of the San Jose Mercury News, which Michael Shapiro wrote about in the November/December issue of the Columbia Journalism Review. Even though partnering with Prodigy was a bad decision, investing serious money in a unique electronic identity was a smart move. “In about six months, all your key management will be saying, ‘Why didn’t we do this five years ago?’” In time, they’ll see what a smart move they made.” I don’t think they believe in their guts, or their wallets, in what they’ve done. “This project was cigarette change for Cox. “In about six months, all your key management will be saying, ‘Why didn’t we do this five years ago?’” Harris told Husted. Harris believed the paper was on the right track, though he sensed (probably correctly) the lack of organizational urgency regarding the venture. And they placed a decent-sized bet on their guess.Īt the time of Access Atlanta’s launch on Prodigy in March 1994, AJC technology columnist Bill Husted interviewed Internet analyst and provocateur Josh Harris about the newspaper’s moves. Even though the AJC guessed wrong on the answers, its management and editorial staff asked a lot of the right questions. After all, nearly every newspaper failed in that. But it’s hard to fault the Journal-Constitution for failing to predict the future correctly. Obviously, the Journal-Constitution bet on the wrong horse - and, in this case, the wrong technological platform, since after AOL drove Prodigy and Compuserve out of business, the World Wide Web rendered AOL’s proprietary service irrelevant. In short order, the pioneers became also-rans. Because the company viewed the digital strategy as a supplement to the print product rather than an eventual replacement, the paper did not see the web as an impetus to change its print-based business model. ![]() Prodigy’s membership stopped growing, crushed by the less staid and more freewheeling America Online, and within a year and a half the AJC was forced to end its association with Prodigy, turning to the web later than many other large newspapers. ![]() Eight months after launch, Neil McManus wrote in the magazine Digital Media that all other newspapers interested in pursuing a digital strategy should visit Access Atlanta “with notebook in hand.”īut that was the apex. It was the first newspaper on the Prodigy Internet service - one of America Online’s two main competitors back in the early 1990s - and within 90 days of launching its Access Atlanta service, it had twice as many online subscribers, 15,000, as any other newspaper in the country. Not many people remember it now, but the Atlanta Journal-Constitution was one of the leading pioneers of the early Internet age. ![]()
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