Printing at home

A news item made us wonder if  the St. Louis Post-Dispatch was decades ahead of its time in 1939 when it introduced new technology for delivering the news.  MediaNews Group has just revealed plans for something called “Individuated News,” or I-News, which lets you print your own customized newspaper on your own printer.

The Romenesko media newsletter links to an article on the Nieman Journalism Lab that tells of the Post-Dispatch’s venture in 1939 into home printing your paper. The Nieman lab’s article is called “Back to the future: MediaNews revives ‘print your own newspaper’”

Part of the I-News plan:

The “individuated” stories selected by each reader are sent to a special printer being developed for MediaNews that each customer would have at home. The printer will format the stories and print them or send them to a computer or mobile phone for viewing later in the day.

The Nieman lab is skeptical. From the Nieman article:

Haven’t we seen this before? Yes indeed. It was in 1939 that radio station W9XZY, owned by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, inaugurated a trial of the first daily newspaper edition transmitted by radio signals to giant facsimile printers located in homes. The technology had been under development since 1934. (And yes, fax technology was around that long ago; in fact, the first fax patent was issued in France in 1843.)

The Miller family in Pittsfield, Mass., owners of the Berkshire Eagle, in an ambitious plan filed away in 1941 just before Pearl Harbor, included this idea on their list of post-war strategies (along with offset printing, acquisition of neighboring newspapers, and television broadcasting). In the 1950s they got as far as installing a giant fax machine that printed instantaneous headlines on a roll of paper that scrolled in a glassed-in display box outside the building. But this idea never went much farther, in St. Louis, Pittsfield or anywhere else.

Later in the Nieman article:

Why on earth would MediaNews want to try this all over again? Sure, there are some fresh bells and whistles in this version: the home printer could send the stories to a computer or mobile phone… But wait, I can already get stories on my computer or mobile phone. And with an RSS feed or other tools, I can customize those stories to my interests. Why do I need a MediaNews-supplied device in my house as intermediary?