• by Laurie Petersen , January 29, 2008

Let's start with this: There is no such thing as onlinepublishing. The term has such a timeworn, old-world aura to it. But the phrase didn't come into being as we think of it until around the mid-'90s, a full decade after the advent of two-way interactive services. It now seems that it should sit on blocks along that long-abandoned stretch of the Information Superhighway in the mists of Web history, essentially outdated and useless for describing the way the Internet is used today.

In the digital pre-dawn, "two-way," "interactive," "electronic publishing," "electronic newspaper," "videotex" and "teletext" were the terms used to describe news, services and communication delivered over telephone lines and accessed through either a dedicated terminal, specially equipped television or first-generation PC. The late '90s exploded in a rush of dot-coms and saw the rise of blogs. Almost everything was static text and pictures, so maybe publishing seemed apt.

But now, I'm reminded of meetings I've sat in where it people droned on and on about converting magazine Quark files into html and slapping them up, with no attention or interest in the nuance of translating the converted information into a usable and rewarding online experience. Little thought was given then to inviting the creators of the information to interact directly with their audience.

  Online publishing suggests ad sales folks still yammering about selling "space" and "page views" as if they were talking about magazines and newspapers but just on monitors, when, in fact, online delivers a unique proposition - customer intent and targetability. It still sounds like one-way shovelware as opposed to conversations and tools that help you get things done.

I worked in the trenches in the early days - first at CBS Venture One, which produced the test videotex service Reach, a precursor to Prodigy - and then at New York Videotex, a long-forgotten division of the New York Times Co. that created ASCII-based New York Pulse - a $4.95-per-month add-on to then-Chemical Bank's Pronto home banking service. Turning over a 22-year-old business card from my last Times job revealed the title "online promotion manager," but I still had no clue as to just where online publishing got its start. So I tried to find out.

The first logical person to ask was Martin Nisenholtz. You'd think one of the founders of the Online Publishers Association would know. But you'd be wrong. Nisenholtz was one of the only people on the ad side in the early '80s at the outset of online media, and is now widely known for having led the digital charge at The New York Times.

  The OPA got its start in 2001. The online part, Nisenholtz figures, arose from the computer world and the earliest database companies like LexisNexis. But as for the origin of the term "online publishing" - he can't pinpoint it.

"I honestly don't know where it came from. I certainly can't take credit for it," says Nisenholtz.

John Carey, a professor of communications and media management at Fordham University in New York and consultant to some of the earliest online ventures, surmises that the expression evolved and took hold in the '90s to describe what "traditional" publishers and database companies were doing online. But he doesn't know who first used it either.

"The term 'online publishing' is using the old model and just slapping it on the new technology," says Carey, noting that this is not unusual for new media forms.

Next call went to Gary Arlen, a Bethesda, Md.-based consultant and publisher of the interactive industry's first newsletters. He distinctly recalls using the term "electronic publishing" in the late '70s and early '80s, and notes that CompuServe offered a compilation of traditional publications it dubbed the Electronic Newsstand.

"The cognoscenti would use the term 'online,' but it was really an insider's term back then," Arlen recalls. "Nobody was calling it online publishing."

Henry Heilbrunn, my old boss at Venture One, who later went on to a senior executive role at Prodigy before embarking on a consulting career, offered the most likely scenario for the derivation of online publishing as an industry standard.

"It wouldn't surprise me," he says, "if online publishing was a gentle way for some change agents within the conventional print industry to gain acceptance of the concept within corporations, as a product-line extension rather than a radical approach to a business."

A search through LexisNexis reveals that the earliest reference can be traced back to 1989 with the late Robert Maxwell's Macmillan buying BRS Information Technologies, a research database and talk of those being "published" on the Web. The search reminded me that in the early days, online was hyphenated as on-line.

More in keeping with current usage, Folio scattered the term liberally in a 1993 article imploring magazine publishers to exploit the upcoming online rush. Then a New York Times Media Business column reported in October 1994 about Wiredmagazine's new HotWired site with the headline: "A Magazine Seeks to Push the On-Line Envelope."

Wrote John Markoff: "Wired has just taken a further step and introduced HotWired, an on-line service that blends electronic publishing and the interactive power of the personal computer with a style of participatory reporting that Wired's editors refer to somewhat self-consciously as 'way new journalism.'"

"The creators are going to some lengths to differentiate HotWired from the host of other on-line publishing efforts," Markoff added. "The new service, which will be free but will require users to sign up as members, will combine relatively short articles on society and technology with a range of interactive features. For instance, the text of a report on a musical group might be accompanied by sound and video clips."

The Big Three among the online services in 1994 were Prodigy(IBM/Sears), CompuServe (H&R Block) and America Online. Outside these corporate biggies were some other popular communities. New York spawned ECHO and the West Coast had The Well.

The Big Three did offer content from numerous traditional publishers then known as information providers, but none called themselves online publishers.

HotWired was one of the first to publish directly to what was then known as the  "Internet's World Wide Web," where the hyperlinking and multimedia capabilities opened up a realm of new experiences to computer owners lucky enough to have high-speed dial-up access (56 Kbps).

  The trouble with the term "online publishing" is that it still conjures a conventional view of the online world - one that is textual, flat and not at all interactive. The irony is that it took awhile, but the industry has advanced considerably from those clichés when it thinks about how to create online brands, extensions and experiences.

Look at the list of Online Publishers Association members - a self-described assembly of the "most trusted and well-respected media brands" - and you'll find the traditional publishers such as Meredith and Time Inc.

  These companies have been in the online game for a long time, and are reinventing themselves as digitally dominated operations as quickly as they can. The list also speaks to the scope of diversity in the entities that do the online thing - content producers ranging from abcnews.com to babycenter.com to weather.com.

It's time to get rid of online publishing and come up with a new term - one recognizing that success in today's marketplace means delivering experiences and meaning to the consumer on whatever platform he or she is using whenever he or she wants. Who else is ready to put publishing out to pasture?

Petersen, formerly executive editor of MediaPost Communications, is now general manager of Minyanville Family Media, a division of Minyanville Publishing and Multimedia. She is a veteran online journalist and producer.