How the Internet Revolution Revealed a New Path for Print Media
The internet didn't just change newspapers—it forced them to confront a fundamental choice about their identity. Would they cling to printing presses and classified ad revenue, or would they recognize that their real expertise lay in gathering, verifying, and presenting information to communities? The organizations that survived understood the difference between their tools and their mission.
Having studied journalism with dreams of becoming a reporter, I watched this transformation unfold with both personal investment and professional curiosity. Though my early career path led me into newspaper advertising rather than the newsroom, newspapers remain close to my heart still. Working at the Boston Globe during their early digital transition in the 1990s taught me everything about how organizational culture determines whether innovation feels threatening or liberating.
Learning Together at the Boston Globe
In the 1990s, The Globe was transforming from being manually typeset every night to an all-digital publication. The professional typesetters were still there working, but instead of manually doing page layouts with pieces of lead, many were sweeping the floors. The Globe didn’t put typesetters out to pasture: they kept their salary and benefits and hung out with their typesetter friends during the day. Some of them opted to learn the new digital systems. They also had the best coffee in the building.
Digitizing the Globe’s operations was a massive endeavor: everyone in the newsroom and everyone in advertising all needed laptops to do their jobs. Even in the early 1990s, paper forms were once required to place an ad, even a tiny classified ad to sell a car.
When advertising sales reps at the Globe received their first laptops in the later 1990s, something remarkable happened. Rather than viewing computers as threats to their relationship-building expertise, the entire organization embraced a learning mindset. As someone in the Marketing department who had just learned Photoshop while earning my bachelor's degree at night, I found myself digitizing assets the sales team needed: maps, competitive analyses, and demographic reports for customers.
What made this transformation successful wasn't the technology itself—it was that we were all learning together. My teammates embraced new approaches because everyone was being trained simultaneously. The IT department provided generous support. Most importantly, leadership explicitly encouraged us to reimagine how we'd always done things.
The results were transformative in ways that seem quaint now but were revolutionary then. Sales reps could email detailed customer information instead of driving through peak Big Dig Boston traffic to deliver paper reports. That single change saved hours per transaction and opened entirely new possibilities for customer service.
The Expertise Expansion Principle
The Globe's success revealed a crucial insight: innovation succeeds when expertise becomes a foundation rather than a barrier. Those sales reps didn't lose their market knowledge or customer relationships when they got laptops—they gained the ability to serve clients faster and more comprehensively. Their understanding of local businesses and advertising effectiveness became more powerful when combined with digital tools.
This principle applies far beyond newspapers. When print media organizations framed digital transition as expanding their storytelling capabilities rather than abandoning their journalism expertise, they thrived. When they viewed it as replacing their core skills, they struggled or died.
The newspapers that survived internet upheaval understood that their real expertise was never about ink and paper—it was about understanding communities, investigating stories, and presenting information clearly. Digital tools didn't threaten that expertise; they enhanced it with faster distribution, multimedia storytelling, and direct reader engagement.
The Learning Window Advantage
The Globe's transformation worked because it created what I now recognize as an organizational learning window—a specific period when everyone acknowledges they need to acquire new skills. During these moments, the usual resistance to change gets suspended because learning becomes the explicit, shared goal.
Unfortunately, most newspapers tried to introduce digital innovations during business-as-usual periods, when change felt disruptive rather than developmental. An organizational immune system activated because digital publishing appeared to threaten existing competence rather than expand it.
Lessons Beyond Print Media
The newspaper industry's digital transformation offers lessons for any organization facing technological disruption. The companies that thrive during transformation are those that help their people feel like explorers rather than defenders. They frame new tools as ways to do familiar work better, not as replacements for familiar work entirely.
When I see organizations today struggling with AI, remote work, or other technological shifts, I think about what newspapers had to do in order to survive. The organizations that will succeed are those creating learning windows where expertise becomes the foundation for innovation rather than the reason to resist it.
The newspapers that embraced digital transformation didn't abandon journalism—they discovered new ways to practice it. That distinction makes all the difference between thriving through change and becoming a casualty of it.
My book BAD FIT: A Career Survival Guide will be available in early 2026. Want early access to chapters and additional resources? Reply to this email—I'd love to hear about your own experiences navigating workplace dysfunction.
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