The Web, Entrenched

In my troll through the day’s headlines this morning, I stumbled across what would normally be a forgettable line in a story about the state of Salon.com, the online news website. The line was buried in a blurb excerpted by Slate.com from a Wall Street Journal article about Salon’s struggle to stay afloat.

“Salon CEO Richard Gingras told the Wall Street Journal on Monday that the venerable online news site ‘is exploring opportunities to merge with or be acquired by another media company.’”

Nothing too fascinating in this sentence, but what caught my eye was the description of the website – “the venerable online news site.” In a world where we share credit card information, bank, shop, and watch television online without a second thought, we forget that it wasn’t so long ago that people questioned the staying power of the Internet. But today, a news organization that has only ever existed on the web can be described as “venerable,” defined by Webster as “calling forth respect through age, character, and attainments.”

How quickly has the Internet evolved? I graduated from high school in 1997, and one of the great challenges of that era of high school life was trying to download a single photo of Reggie White within the confines of a 45-minute study hall. Netscape was our browser, and chat rooms were amazing new ways to communicate. Google was non-existent, not to mention gmail, Firefox, iTunes, and YouTube, all staples of communication today. We still ran our fantasy sports leagues via fax and hand-tabulated scores gathered from newspaper box scores.

But today the Wall Street Journal, one of the icons of print journalism, reports on Salon.com, a “venerable news site.” I came across this snippet through the Slate Dozen, a daily aggregation of top stories that I get sent to my inbox each morning. Slate is another online news site, which in turn pulled the Wall Street Journal story from the Journal’s website, not its “venerable” print edition. None of this amazes anymore. It’s all just part of the routine now. How quickly times have changed.