The first electronic versions of print newspapers were available in the early 1990s through commercial services like America Online and CompuServe.
In 1996, newspapers and magazines began offering websites with a partial or full version of their latest issue, available freely or through subscription (free or paid), as well as online archives.
For example, the site of The New York Times site could be accessed free of charge, with articles of the print daily newspaper, breaking news updated every ten minutes, and original reporting only available online. The site of The Washington Post gave the daily news online, with a full database of articles, with images, sound and video.
In United Kingdom, the daily Times and the Sunday Times set up a common website called Times Online, with a way to create a personalized edition. The weekly publication The Economist went online, as well as the daily Le Monde and Libération in France, the daily El País in Spain, and the weekly Focus and Der Spiegel in Germany.
The computer press went logically online as well, first the monthly Wired, created in 1992 in California to cover cyberculture as "the magazine of the future at the avant-garde of the 21st century", then ZDNet, as a leading computer online magazine.
"More than 3,600 newspapers now publish on the internet", Eric K. Meyer stated in late 1997 in an essay published on the website of AJR/NewsLink. "A full 43% of all online newspapers now are based outside the United States. A year ago, only 29% of online newspapers were located abroad. Rapid growth, primarily in Canada, the United Kingdom, Norway, Brazil and Germany, has pushed the total number of non-U.S. online newspapers to 1,563. The number of U.S. newspapers online also has grown markedly, from 745 a year ago to 1,290 six months ago to 2,059 today. Outside the United States, the United Kingdom, with 294 online newspapers, and Canada, with 230, lead the way. In Canada, every province or territory now has at least one online newspaper. Ontario leads the way with 91, Alberta has 44, and British Columbia has 43. Elsewhere in North America, Mexico has 51 online newspapers, 23 newspapers are online in Central America and 36 are online in the Caribbean. Europe is the next most wired continent for newspapers, with 728 online newspaper sites. After the United Kingdom, Norway has the next most - 53 - and Germany has 43. Asia (led by India) has 223 online newspapers, South America (led by Bolivia) has 161 and Africa (led by South Africa) has 53. Australia and other islands have 64 online newspapers."
The online versions of these newspapers brought us a wealth of information. The web provided not only news available online, but also a whole encyclopedia to help us understand them. As readers, we could click on hyperlinks to get maps, biographies, official texts, political and economic data, photographs, and audio and video coverage. We could easily access other articles on the same topic with search engines sorting out articles by date, author, title, or subject.
1997: MULTIMEDIA CONVERGENCE AND EMPLOYMENT
= [Overview]
More and more people were using digital technology. Previously distinct information-based industries, such as printing, publishing, graphic design, media, sound recording and film making, were converging into one industry, with information as a common product. This trend was named "multimedia convergence", with a massive loss of jobs, and a serious enough issue to be tackled by the ILO (International Labor Organization) by 1997. The first ILO Symposium on Multimedia Convergence was held in January 1997 at ILO headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland, with employers, unionists, and government representatives from all over the world. Some participants, mostly employers, demonstrated the information society was generating or would generate jobs, whereas other participants, mostly unionists, demonstrated there was a rise in unemployment worldwide, that should be addressed right away through investment, innovation, vocational training, computer literacy, retraining, and fair labor rights, including for teleworkers.