One of the earliest efforts to get newspapers to work together online was called New Century Network (NCN). There were several powerhouse newspaper chains involved, and the goal was to build a national portal which pulled together the best news and information from each of the various chains involved. Various fatal flaws:
- Newspaper chains hate each other more than they hated Yahoo and Excite, whom they rightly (well, at least in Yahoo’s case) saw as the real competition.
- News was not a killer business online in the early days. I think information, after communication, is the killer app of the internet, but whether it’s a killer business is still being learned/explored.
- Too early. NCN wanted to bring together national advertisers as a key part of its business plan… but online advertising was still too ad-hoc in the 1996-1998 time frame.
I was involved with NCN pretty closely as a partner while working on Snap.com (known then as Snap! Online). We used their zip-code mapping file, I remember, to surface the right newspaper website when someone asked for ‘local’ news. It worked, but NCN didn’t even last as long as Snap.com did, and that’s saying something.
All this comes to mind because Hypergene bemoans the plethora of newspaper passwords needed today, and suggests a news passport. Maybe I’m wrong, but I’ll say here that it will never happen, for (at least) the first reason cited above.