Hemingway & Gellhorn, and The Newsroom

Things are looking up in the “recent examples” department for my fall course on the portrayal of journalists in popular culture.

HBO’s famous-writers docudrama about Martha Gellhorn and Ernest Hemingway reminds me a bit of United Press’s “Soldiers of the Press” radio series from the 1940s, which had actors in a studio dramatizing the lives of war correspondents while the reporters were still off on the battle-fronts.

Since Memorial Day I’ve been working my way through a batch of those World War II episodes over at jheroes: Newspaper Heroes on the Air, learning a little history, thinking about the blurred boundaries between reporting and propaganda, and puzzling through a mystery or two along the way.

I hope that when the fall semester starts, students will be able to get at the HBO Hemingway & Gellhorn film to do the same. Maybe I can convince one or two in my Portrayal of the Journalist in Popular Culture course to do research projects drawing some comparisons between docudrama and history, film and radio, or between an HBO movie and the new HBO series, The Newsroom.

Thanks to HBO for putting the full first episode on YouTube for students (and faculty) who don’t have HBO in their back-to-school budgets! Alas, HBO only kept it there temporarily… This was the link.

HBO now (August) provides a The Newsroom website with supplementary information and synopses of episodes.

I started this blog post to gradually accumulate links to reviews and reflections on the two HBO offerings. Some I’ll just tag in my bookmark collection at http://delicious.com/bstepno

• http://www.hbo.com/movies/hemingway-and-gellhorn/index.html
• http://m.motherjones.com/media/2012/05/film-review-hemingway-and-gellhorn-hbo-clive-owen-nicole-kidman
• http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/27/movies/philip-kaufman-and-walter-murch-collaborate-on-hemingway-gellhorn.html
• http://tv.nytimes.com/2012/05/28/arts/television/hemingway-gellhorn-has-its-premiere-on-hbo.html
• http://www.metacritic.com/tv/hemingway-and-gellhorn
• Martha Gellhorn in PBS series on War Correspondents
• Gellhorn: D-Day Stowaway , U.S. Department of Defense article; also more general article on women war correspondents.
• delicious.com/bstepno/Hemingway
• delicious.com/bstepno/Gellhorn
• The earlier Newsroom, 1996 (Its IMDB page)
• delicious.com/bstepno/TheNewsroom
• New York Times items about The Newsroom

Updated Aug. 30, 2012

When a Pickle Showed Patriotic Colors

A reminiscence: According to one of the authors, this was an April Fool story that got misdirected to the Fourth of July.

Back in the summer of 1979, I was writing the daily “People in the News” column that ran on page two of The Hartford Courant. While never proving any threat to Liz Smith, I would cull through Playboy magazine interviews, tabloid papers’ gossip columns, and the major wire services’ “Names in the News” features to find material to rewrite and fill my “combined wires” space.

It was a lot like today’s aggregation-style blogging; it gave me time to write longer features, and by relying heavily on each evening’s wire stories I had mornings free to go to grad school. (In anthropology and ethnomusicology at Wesleyan University, which, in a round-about way, led to my career shift into the software industry, which webbed my way back to journalism.)

One July day in 1979, the copy desk chief tossed me a couple of feet of wire-printer paper and said something like, “We don’t have room for this; maybe part of it will work in the People column.”

It was a remarkable story about a man in Winsted, Conn., “inventing” a red, white and blue pickle. It had been in a July Fourth weekend Waterbury Republican newspaper, and the wire service picked it up from there. I couldn’t believe it, and set it aside to process other items.

Some papers did run it, as you can see above… But before I got back to the Winsted item, the copy chief tossed over another piece of wire paper and said, “Hey, don’t use that pickle thing. It’s a hoax.” That also made it into print elsewhere…

I looked at both wire stories. The second one said the reporters (“stringers” or “freelancers”) would no longer be writing for the Waterbury paper. Google News’s archive of scanned papers provides the evidence above that elsewhere in the country, there were editors who fell for the pickle piece or at least entertained their readers with the after-the-fact hoax story.

(It’s intriguing that the Sarasota paper carried the story. Sarasota, you may know, is the home of the Ringling Bros., Barnum & Bailey Circus Museum. The famous hoaxster P.T. Barnum, like the pickle story, was a Connecticut native, born about 27 miles from Waterbury.)

Before I decided what to do, I looked at the Waterbury paper. It had a picture of the man holding his innovative pickle. It had stripes. It had a square field of blue with stars — or at least dots. As I recall, he was wearing a moustache, sunglasses and maybe a pith helmet, reminding me of Leon Redbone without a guitar.

“How on earth could they have believed this thing?” I asked myself. I forget how I tracked down the reporters, but I did. Maybe someone at the Republican gave me their number, or maybe their names were in the story. In any case, I got one of them on the phone, and I asked clever journalistic questions like, “What on earth were you thinking?” and “How in heck did you get this past the editor?”

After all, Americans generally do not make July Fourth a day for hoaxes.

The co-author of the hoax had a fascinating explanation. I forget whether I checked it with his editors in Waterbury. By then, my deadline was probably approaching. And, after all, all that I needed was a paragraph for the “People” column. But, from memory, here’s what the writer said:

He and his partner had written the story as a joke, he said, but not for July Fourth. He said they wrote it months earlier, for April Fool’s Day. They turned it in, then didn’t hear back from the paper, so they assumed an editor thought it was a stupid idea, even for April 1st, and threw it away. It hadn’t been the first time they gave the paper something silly.

After the story appeared in July, he speculated that instead of reading enough to get the joke back in April, someone at the paper must have seen “red, white and blue” as a theme and filed the item in a “follow” folder for possible use on a patriotic holiday, without doing a lot of critical thinking or fact-checking… or, perhaps, without even reading it.

Then along came the July 4 weekend — notorious as a “slow news day” and as a day when the “A-team” staff takes a vacation. Again, it’s easy to conclude that not a lot of critical thinking went on at the Waterbury news desk that day… And the same apparently was true at the wire service office…

Or at papers like the Sarasota one that fell for it, hook, line… and pickle.

Today, with the Internet as a research tool, you can even learn that the red-white-and-blue hoax wasn’t original in Winsted. Decades earlier, another journalist from that quiet community had faked a story about a chicken’s red-white-and-blue eggs, presumably to get through yet another slow holiday weekend. According to that item, he went on to be general manager of the Winsted Citizen, and had a bridge over Sucker Creek named for him.

As for my own story, the Courant does not provide free online archives  and I don’t feel like paying $3.95 for an old pickle story. If that search link found the right item, my memory is correct that the pickle story didn’t even lead the People column. The column’s first paragraph, which is all the Courant search engine lets you see for free, was, “Italians are dancing the praises of Pope John Paul II to a disco tune. A record called the ‘Wojtyla Disco Dance’ is said to have sold 30,000 copies in Italy in the last two weeks….”

I hope that wasn’t a hoax, too.

What writing is…

The “quick Christmas break research project” that I began two and a half years ago keeps leading to new things, most of which I’m recording at my Newspaper Heroes on the Air site (jheroes.com for short), which is primarily about the golden age of radio drama, and how print journalists were portrayed on the radio. But some of the radio adventures I document there were based on movies, some on history books, biographies or novels, and some on movies that were based on books.

All of those themes will fit into my fall course on Portrayal of the Journalist in Popular Culture. So I have gone from the early “research” of falling asleep listening to Superman, Green Hornet and Soldiers of the Press episodes to checking the film and print sources of the radio dramas,  watching the movies, reading the novels, paging through the histories and biographies, looking up the old newspaper stories, and once in a while finding a jewel of a quote like this:

Only amateurs say that they write for their own amusement. Writing is not an amusing occupation. It is a combination of ditch-digging, mountain-climbing, treadmill and childbirth. Writing may be interesting,absorbing,exhilarating, racking, relieving. But amusing? Never!
–Edna Ferber, A Peculiar Treasure, 1940, p.5

I guess that’s reason enough to my meandering train of thoughts spill over into this “Other Journalism” blog, making it more of a “my summer reading” discussion.  A Peculiar Treasure is an early autobiography by Ms. Ferber, an author I hadn’t read until a radio item led me to a movie, which led to one book, then another and another and another.

Ferber was born in 1885 and lived until 1968, almost 30 more years after deciding to turn introspective and write that biography… which touches on her ancestors’ lives in Hungary and Germany, her parents lives in Chicago, and her birth in “that faintly improbable-sounding town called Kalamazoo, Michigan.”

“… In that way perhaps I may be able to discover what I am doing at a typewriter in a penthouse apartment on top of a roof on Park Avenue, New York.”

The books, plays and movies that got her to that penthouse interest me, too, as do her reflections on being Jewish in early 20th century America, growing up with the publishing world in New York and the movie world of Hollywood. (She also wrote ShowBoat and Giant, among other less-newspaperish works.) But my main interest is journalism and the way journalists are portrayed in her books, in preparation for my  course in the fall. So my new summer reading is books by and about Edna Ferber. And I wasn’t surprised to find where her writing career began — although 17 was an earlier age than I expected:

“There never had been a woman reporter in Appleton. The town, broad-minded though it was, put me down as definitely cuckoo. Not crazy, but strange. Big-town newspapers such as the Chicago Tribune and the Milwaukee Sentinel employed women on their editorial and reportorial staffs, but usually these were what is known as special or feature writers, or they conducted question-and-answer columns, advice to the lovelorn, society columns or woman’s pages. But at seventeen on the Appleton Crescent I found myself covering a regular news beat like any man reporter. I often was embarrassed, sometimes frightened, frequently offended and offensive, but I enjoyed it, and knowing what I know today I wouldn’t swap that year and a half of small town newspaper reporting for any four years of college education…. I learned how to sketch in human beings with a few rapid words, I learned to see, to observe to remember; learned, in short, the first rules of writing.”
–Edna Ferber, A Peculiar Treasure, 1940, p.103

My own starting point with Edna Ferber was a pair of radio adaptations of a movie made from one of her novels, part of my investigation of more than three dozen radio adaptations of movies with journalists in them. Even though the radio scripts of “Cimarron” were short on details, they  featured a fascinating “newspaper” couple: a gunslinger-lawyer-editor, and his semi-abandoned wife, who takes over the newspaper and builds a career that takes her to Congress.

They have the unlikely “frontier” names of  Yancey and Sabra Cravat, and you can hear the rather thin radio adaptation of the Cimarron story at jheroes.com. For the 1931 Academy Award winning film adaptation, you will have to look elsewhere — but don’t settle for the 1960 version, which strays far from Ferber’s original. I went from there to the original novel, which has much more to say about American myths and themes like race, region and “the frontier,” than either movie attempted. The tale of the film adaptations itself is fascinating, told in another book on my summer shelf, Edna Ferber’s Hollywood.

From there, a little biographical and  bibliographical searching easily uncovered the fact that Ferber started writing as a 17-year-old newspaper reporter, and that her first novel was also about a young woman with a newspaper job, Dawn O’Hara, the Girl Who Laughed, which is now out of copyright and available in free e-book and LibriVox audiobook editions.

My most recent discovery: Not only was Ferber a newspaper reporter before becoming a Pulitzer-winning novelist and playwright, now she has become a somewhat fictional creation herself! A gentleman named Ed Ifkovic has turned her into a character in a series of mystery novels that involve even more famous people she knew, or might have known. The cover of one has James Dean, one of the stars of the film adaptation of her book, Giant. Another features escape artist Harry Houdini, and is set back in Appleton, Wisc., where Ferber got her start as a reporter right out of high school. That, of course, got me curious and clicking on Google again…

Fiction? Here, from the Appleton Public Library’s Edna Ferber page, is the young Ms. Ferber’s 1904 interview with Houdini.

Step Away from the Mouse

Distracting the author -- from Twain's Editorial Wild Oats

Macintosh users may just yawn when Jane Wells of WordPress starts out her “Now More Than Ever: Just Write” essay with the demise of Internet Explorer’s old version, but she gets downright inspiring after that: WordPress (and Firefox and Google Chrome) now lets users break out of the confining window-in-a-window blog-style editing interface.

I’m using the new full-screen editor to write this, and it’s very cool. It’s especially good news to me, since I’m using WordPress to write my other blog — the one that might turn into a book someday, if I can avoid distractions this summer.

WordPress is even calling this the new distraction-free writing feature, so they’ve got my number! And the feature has its own support area and discussion forum, although that might be too much of a distraction.

It was a line on one of those linked pages that convinced me to try the new feature: “But once you let go of the mouse and get to writing, the real magic starts to happen.” The other convincer was the headline on Ms. Wells’ article.

The Paige Compositor, no mouse required

“JustWrite,” you see, was the name of a word processing program that I had some fun with about 25 years ago, during a brief foray into technical writing and public relations for a software company. JustWrite was a spin-off of the long-winded “Multimate Advantage Professional Word Processor.” Just shrinking the name of the product down to two syllables was an enormous, er, advantage.

Like MultiMate and this new WordPress feature (and the Paige Compositor, above), JustWrite could be operated entirely from the keyboard. I don’t remember whether it would  know what to do with a mouse if it saw one.  Like word processors of old, this WordPress fullscreen editor even knows to switch to italics when I hit command-I on the Macintosh. And to stop when I hit the key again. No mouse needed, until I decided to insert the woodcuts. I mean, “images.”

Actually, “JustWrite” began as something called “MultiMate Jr.” back when IBM was threatening the world with a little computer called the “PC Jr.” The computer had a wireless keyboard, but was a bomb (not “the bomb”), crippled so that it wouldn’t replace business PCs, and it was cancelled.

Driving the editor to distraction -- from Twain's Editorial Wild Oats

So was our neat little word processing program, and the cancellation cost some very creative technical writers their jobs. (I think the programmers just switched to adding features to already bloated MultiMate.) But I loved the first draft of the how-to book, which was never published: Someone on the “Jr.” team had the wonderful idea of basing a kids’ word processing tutorial on the works of Mark Twain, using lots of his early references to using a typewriter as well as bits from stories kids had read in school.

I forget whether they used anything about his losing his shirt on investments in an early typesetting machine — a masterpiece with 18,000 parts. He, if not the Multimate Jr. documentation team, might have appreciated the irony.

A year or two later, the renamed and re-branded JustWrite, now an “entry-level” word processor aimed at adults, still didn’t do much better than Multimate Jr. It “shipped,” minus the Twain-centric manual, but it was cancelled within a year. A company full of Silicon Valley hubris bought our modest Connecticut outfit and made it a less fun place to work. Soon after, I retreated back to grad school to explore something called “hypertext.”

As for Twain’s problems with technology, the evidence is still there, at The Mark Twain House & Museum in Hartford, right over the river from East Hartford, former home of MultiMate International.

The Twain House preserved the last of the Paige Compositors, which its website calls the “typesetting machine that drove the family to the brink of bankruptcy, forcing them to leave their Hartford home.”

It also has Twain’s 1904 billiard table. Sometimes, I guess, even the best writers need some distraction.

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Footnote: If you need some distraction, read some of the things Twain had to say about journalism in his Editorial Wild Oats, now preserved by Project Gutenberg in a variety of formats. It’s the source of the two images above.

When newspapers had…

Editor Carole Tarrant of The Roanoke Times mentioned this picture on Twitter this morning, noting that the dress is made entirely from her newspaper. (The picture was posted by Brent Watts of Channel 7.)

That reminded me of a poem I learned around the time I was in junior high. I suspect it was already quite old.

There once was a miss from St. Paul
Who went to a newspaper ball.
Her dress caught on fire,
And burnt her entire
Front page, sporting section and all.

The concept of a “newspaper ball” puzzled me at the time. But I concluded that in some olden days, maybe around the time of Captain Billy’s Whiz-Bang and back when papers wrote of “sporting,”  their publishers may have promoted their business through community events like the annual “newspaper ball.”

In fact, a newspaper I later worked for sponsored a summer camp. Its competition sponsored a camp AND a Christmas carol sing, among other things. That didn’t keep it from going out of business. Our paper just had more news — arguably a more effective way of serving its 100-some communities.

But it wasn’t a big stretch to think that a circulation-hungry newspaper might sponsor a debutante cotillion or annual “newspaper ball.” I wondered whether part of the joke of the limerick was that the girl misunderstood and actually made a dress out of newspaper. Or maybe that was part of the event. In those years before Twitter, perhaps some circulation stunt actually invited women to make such dresses. It sounds like something The New York Evening Graphic might cook up. It was famous for its contests and its Lonely Hearts Club Ball — which even figured in Samuel Fuller’s novel, The Dark Page, and the film Scandal Sheet.

The main joke of the St. Paul poem, as is usually the case with limericks, is the hint of naughtiness — referring to the young lady’s “sporting section,” indeed. For shame! Such poor taste, sinking to double-entendre puns. Who would do such a thing? (OK, is that enough foreshadowing of an unfair cheapshot?)

But I did a story about limericks once; they suit my low sense of humor and stick in my memory. (My story was about a community college limerick contest that got Isaac Asimov to be the judge; the Associated Press picked up my story and even Time magazine got in the act.)

So after seeing Carole Tarrant’s Twitter link to the photograph, I went looking for a copy of that old “St. Paul… newspaper ball…” limerick online to send her a link.

I was disappointed. The ones Google hit first were, I suspect, newer versions. Their essential double-dactyl rhythm (dot dash dot dot dash dot dot dash) was lost by lengthening the second line, even if that did clarify the meaning — to “who wore a newspaper dress to a ball” or “who made a dress of newspapers for a ball.” How sad.

The moral: Even bad poetry suffers when people can’t remember a time when newspapers were a bigger part of everyday life, when they covered all the news in their communities, and when some of them even had balls.

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(OK, that would be a cheapshot if I just ended there. If getting editors to Twitter or convincing young women to dress up in the comic sections would sell more newspapers, I’d be all for it. That’s assuming the boost in circulation would mean jobs for more reporters like the Roanoke’ Times’s Ralph Berrier and Beth Macy, more reporters to cover more news, whether they do it with broadsheet pages, books, blogs, Twitter posts or limericks. )

Happy 30th anniversary to my first computer

The Osborne I and its external monitor; photo probably from 1984. Could I have been singing its second-birthday song?

Harry McCracken, who suffered through being my editor at three different magazines, has written a fascinating history of one of the first “boom, then bust” computer companies: The one I bought my first computer from. In fact, its going bust helped get me into the computer business.

See: Osborne! at Harry’s blog, Technologizer.

I added comments to the first page of the article, but I was (ironically) writing on a screen about half the size of my old Osborne — a Droid — and it left out all the paragraph breaks, making a rather hard-to-read essay. So here’s a copy. I was also using the Droid’s “speech to text” feature, so I’ll correct at least some of the typos here. (Ironically, after posting this version, I discovered I could go back and edit the blog comment at Technologizer, so I went back and inserted some paragraph breaks.)

I was one of about 40 faculty members and grad students who bought Osborne I computers at Wesleyan University in 1982 after the university put some faculty “ideal personal computer specs” out to bid. The case, keyboard and small screen looked a lot like a portable terminal people had been using at the Hartford Courant when I was a reporter there in the late 1970s to early ’80s. I think it had a cassette tape drive built in and was compatible with the newspaper’s ATEX system. Teleram? (After posting this to Harry’s page via the Droid, I searched for Teleram. Here’s a picture and a detailed story. )

At Wesleyan the software bundle was the primary selling point for the Osborne. I recall an Apple ][, if you added to floppy drives and all of that software, would have come in at easily double the price we paid for the Osborne I with dBaseII, SuperCalc, WordStar, mBasic, cBasic , the Original Adventure game MyChess and I forget what all else.

In December 1982 (or was it ’81?) when we took delivery, the bundle also included an external monitor which would double the 52 columns screen making 104 columns (great for spreadsheets), double density disk drives and a 300 baud modem… or maybe the modem was extra. I do remember that the computer center hacked together cables we could use to plug an Osborne directly into the DEC-20 mainframe as a terminal and do file transfers.

Doing document conversion between our mainframe editor and WordStar was another thing. I became a big fan of ASCII and the print-formatting program on the DEC system. I also went to work for the university A/V wizard, Bob White, who physically hacked the insides of 24-inch classroom TV monitors to work with an Osborne so that a professor could show spreadsheets in class. I recall his trick involved cutting some sheet metal and wrapping a cylinder around the back end of the picture tube. (Kids, don’t try this at home! Ymmv.)

I became editor of the Wesleyan Osborne Group newsletter, a “support system” for campus users when the company went bankrupt, and I shared the Osborne with other students to get a discount on a 1983 summer computer course with the amazing Russ Walter of “Secret Guide to Computers” fame… starting me on the way to a second master’s and my 1986-88 hypertext research.

Russ’s courses and the newsletter plus some other how to things I had written for the Wes computer center got me my first job in the computer industry 1984 at MultiMate–also due for a 30th anniv soon) ultimately leading to working for Harry McCracken at IDG. So it’s all thanks to Adam Osborne, as I said in my post at Technologizer.

One thing I didn’t get to mention was that when I finally set to work on my Ph.D., my first faculty adviser at UNC Chapel Hill was a research wizard named Frank Biocca, whose credentials in the world of computer technology began a dozen years earlier, when he worked in P.R. or advertising for Osborne Computers.

Why, Baby, Why? Shaky link to history at USAToday.com

Don’t let your robot-editor hurt your credibility

End of summer ‘lull’ opens opportunities – USATODAY.com.

The “End of summer…” in that headline link might hint that I’m not keeping up with the news. But I just stumbled on USA Today founder Al Neuharth’s column about newspaper history anniversaries while searching for something else and decided to add it to my media-history bookmark collection.

In the process, I noticed a forgotten man — the gent on the right.

I had forgotten him myself, but USAToday.com had remembered him with a link — very badly.

Despite what USA Today might have led you to believe, the man in question was never a country singer married to Tammy Wynette, and did not have hits like “Why, Baby, Why?” and “He Just Stopped Lovin’ Her Today.” He was the first  publisher of The New York Times.

When I think of  the founders of The New York Times, I think of Adolph S. Ochs, the one-time-Tennessean who set its “All the news that’s fit to print” agenda when he bought the struggling paper in 1896, and of Henry Raymond, a former star reporter for Horace Greeley‘s Tribune who was the first editor of the Times in 1851.

But until I saw Neuharth’s column, I had forgotten that Raymond had a partner named George Jones, a former banker turned publisher, who carried on long after Raymond’s death. I pulled down my copy of Meyer Berger’s history of the Times to refresh my memory, and popped over to Wikipedia for a picture.

It was nice of former USA Today publisher Neuharth to remember Mr. Jones, and I’m sure he wasn’t the one who placed that hyperlink to the wrong George Jones.

In fact, I don’t think any human did. My guess is that the link was added by something like a Perl or Python computer script in the USAToday.com content management system, programmed to match up a database list of “famous people” archive pages with names in the news. Result: Wrong George. The fact that the mistaken link has been there for six months doesn’t give me great feelings about the paper’s quality control.

My advice to online news publishers:

• Useful hyperlinks are part of any online story.
• Don’t leave them to idiots.
• Computer programs are idiots, unless you spend IBM-style Jeopardy-beating millions of dollars on them.
• But don’t. It would be better to spend the millions on a new generation of young fact-checkers and editors. You might start the careers of some future Henry Raymonds… or Al Neuharths.

Just in case you think that single computer-generated off-base hyperlink is the only problem, here are the “You might also be interested in…” headlines USAToday.com added to the end of that newspaper-history story for me:

• College hookups aren’t as common as people think (USATODAY.com in News)
• Obama to propose five-year spending freeze (USATODAY.com in The Oval)
• Lake Superior’s great mystery (USATODAY.com in News)
• Obama to Gibbs on last day: Here’s your tie back (USATODAY.com in The Oval)

Actually, I’d rather read about George Jones. Either one of them.

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Sidebar: Speaking of Horace Greeley… I’ve been running into him a lot recently.

Behind the Microphone

Archive.org has had copies of this film at various resolutions for years, but I just noticed that it’s now at YouTube too, which means I can embed it here for easy reference.

Actually spelled “Back of the Mike,” this nine-minute 1938 film shows what’s going on in a young radio listener’s mind, along with what’s going on in the radio studio.

The film reminds me a bit of an ad for one of the old Infocom text-only computer adventures; the ad showed a rainbow-hued cross section of a human brain, with the headline “We put our graphics where the sun don’t shine.”

Happy Birthday, World Wide Web

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=long-live-the-web

Tim Berners-Lee’s “20 years ago this month” article for the December issue of Scientific American is a great issue-oriented summary of Web history  — and a plea for online entrepreneurs to adopt policies of openness rather than creating “closed worlds.”

An excerpt:

“The tendency for magazines, for example, to produce smartphone ‘apps’ rather than Web apps is disturbing, because that material is off the Web. You can’t bookmark it or e-mail a link to a page within it. You can’t tweet it.

“It is better to build a Web app that will also run on smartphone browsers, and the techniques for doing so are getting better all the time.”

Kudos : I was able to copy, paste and share that quote here thanks to the open Web standards begun by Sir Tim and used by Scientific American, WordPress and my Android phone–with the assistance of a WordPress Android app.

Page formatting at Scientific American’s site isn’t entirely small-screen mobile-friendly, but the magazine  clearly “gets” Berners-Lee’s belief in two-way hypertext linkage.

Celebrating first “summer of code,” Web launchings, 15 and 20 years ago

A few months more than 20 years ago, the pleasure boating monthly Soundings published an article headlined “Computers link boaters oceans apart,” probably the first time I managed to get something about the Internet into good-old-fashioned print.  The piece actually had more to do with commercial computer networks like CompuServe, Prodigy and BIX than the free-for-all Internet, but it did mention the ARPANET, BITNET and UUCP, all components of the pre-Web ‘net.

That was February of 1990, the year that computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee started defining the HyperText Markup Language and HyperText Transfer Protocol that would link Internet resources together like never before. I guess that means this is the 20th anniversary of the Web’s first “summer of code,” now an annual ritual for programmers.

Berners-Lee had proposed his “World Wide Web” idea in 1989 and spent a year at it, delivering the first browser and server by Christmas, and introducing it to an audience of physics researchers and technologists over the next year or two. The thing really took off in 1993 and 1994, after the University of Illinois’ NCSA released Mosaic, a free browser that used graphics and worked on  PCs and Macintoshes, as well as the Unix machines the research community used in the Web’s inaugural years.

That was enough to send me back to grad school — for a faster Internet connection — at the University of North Carolina, home of some of the first hypertext research and some of the first Web servers in the U.S., including sunsite.unc.edu, which I had been reaching from a Connecticut boatyard over a modem, a service called BIX and a text-only browser link to “laUNChpad.unc.edu.”

In Chapel Hill, Sunsite’s boss, Paul Jones, told me to give him my resume in HTML, so I figured out just enough of the language, using (I think) an early ncsa.uiuc.edu tutorial. But before Sunsite came up with an opening, the Raleigh News & Observer launched NandO.net, and I landed a part-time job preparing news stories for the Web at what was one of the Internet’s first 24/7 news sites.

In the beginning, we were publishing Web versions of stories from all or most of the wire services the N&O subscribed to for its print editions — treating the Web site as just another edition of the newspaper, but one that could handle dozens of new or updated stories every hour, drawing on the Associated Press, Reuters, The New York Times wire service, Bloomberg News and more. (There must have been some very interesting executive discussions of just what publication rights were covered by those wire contracts!)

The real surprise for me came as the school year was wrapping up — a call from Soundings‘ editor, Marleah Ross, announcing that my old employer, the monthly tabloid subtitled “The nation’s boating newspaper,” was launching a Web site of its own, and that I was invited to write the cover story for the August 1995 issue, then follow up with a regular column called “Data Waves.” The goal was to tell boaters why on earth they should care about the World Wide Web.

Fifteen years later, Soundingspub.com is still online, and I’ve just spent some nostalgic weeks documenting its online beginnings, and paying tribute to its late publisher, Jack Turner. See the current issue of the aptly titled Journal of Magazine and New Media Research. My essay “Getting Under Way in New Media” is downloadable as a PDF file here, but I also recommend the other articles in the journal, including editor Carol Schwalbe’s essay on “Finishability: An Antidote to Information Overload.” (Note, as of this writing the edition’s directory is at a “current issue” address, but it will be moved to an archival page in the fall, when a new edition comes out.)