Right, and I Knew Springsteen Would Be Huge When I Heard "Mary Queen of Arkansas"

Businessweek disassembles the newspaper industry's "coulda shoulda might've" story of the newspaper's relationship to the Internet. It starts, the story tells us, with Bob Ingle, then executive editor of the San Jose Mercury News. Ingle allegedly "knew" the Internet would be a gigantic phenomenon back in 1990 -- i.e., before anyone but maybe three people "knew" that. The story suggests that if the Merc and the industry had only listened to Ingle, newspapers might today be Internet power players instead of Internet victims.

First of all, I don't remember it that way. I almost joined the Merc back in the early 1990s, and talked with Ingles and saw the online Mercury Center operation. It was an ambitious project with management support. But it was too early and didn't get it quite right. The audience never came, and parent Knight-Ridder put the project on ice.

A 1994 New York Times story describes things pretty much the same way.

The newspaper industry's failure to take advantage of the Internet isn't the story of one failed project or one lone voice in the dark. It's the story of multiple bad decisions over years. The industry had plenty of time once the Net took off in 1995 to beat to market the likes of Craigslist , Digg, and Monster.com. But executives failed to act over and over again.

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