Down to the Wire 1998: All the President's Privates

Vincent Heeringa talks about journalists dragging their heels on accepting user generated content.

Down to the Wire 1998 - All the President's Privates

The day we all rushed online to read a description of President Bill Clinton's private parts, was the day that mainstream media really started to worry about the impact of this Internet thing.

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Our television and newspaper media had all started to dabble in online presences by 1998, with varying success. The Press in Christchurch had pushed their stories online since 1996 to some acclaim. Up in the Big Smoke it took until a second refresh in 1998 for the New Zealand Herald Online to live up to the promise of its name and win fans from the various local online tastemakers and award sites.

Mainstream media were transforming from covering the Internet offline with quirky or scary stories, to becoming fully-fledged online publishers themselves. Republishing offline content online was still not biting into their existing revenue streams, but upcoming events would prove the value of the new medium over the old – for the consumer if not for the papers and their advertising revenue.

In 1998 that is all that online news media consisted of - republished offline content. While around them a ragtag collection of bloggers were growing to represent alternative views points, for now the mainstream media doors were very firmly closed on allowing the reader to add their voice to the story.