Media revolutions: From Gutenberg to the iPad

Major revolutions in the way people share information have been relatively rare compared to the recent upheaval in the news industry today, with its accelerating flow of new products like the latest smart phones, iPads and other mobile devices.

Ancient civilizations left messages on the walls of caves, tablets and parchment, which eventually led to the first public library, in Athens in 540 B.C. It took nearly another 2,000 years before Johannes Gutenberg, a German goldsmith, developed a way to make news available to the masses.

Gutenberg ushered in the print revolution in 1440, altering the way people conceived of the world they lived in. In 1620, English statesman and philosopher Francis Bacon described the printed word as "changing the whole face and state of things throughout the world."

The next leap would be an audio/visual one. In 1888, George Eastman introduced the Kodak camera and Heinrich Hertz transmitted wireless sound waves. By 1911, newsreels brought news to moviegoers, and in 1936, England became the first country with regular television broadcasts.

That broadcast revolution ushered in an era in which people around the globe watched on live television in 1969 as Neil Armstrong walked on the moon.

The digital revolution wasn't far behind. By the 1990s, information now traveled the globe at 186,000 miles an hour on the Internet to computers and cell phones.

"News has been fundamentally changed by innovation and technology," Deseret News President and CEO Clark Gilbert said. "There are exciting and wonderful elements to this because the Internet has expanded the reach of news and information to a level never before possible. But those same changes have altered the fundamental business model of print publishing."

Gilbert noted that at a time when the digital revolution ushers in vast opportunities for news distribution, many traditional newspapers are fading or even closing.

The Deseret News and deseretnews.com have chosen a different path, he said, one that will build on centuries of news gathering and distribution: "We choose to innovate and lead."

email: sarah@desnews.com