Welcome to another edition of The First Time News Was Fit To Print, the semi-regular feature where we travel into the archives of The New York Times and find the first time the paper covered various subjects. If you have a suggestion for a future installment, leave a comment.

Disneyland

May 2, 1954

Land of Fantasia Is Rising on Coast
A cost estimate of $9,000,000 for the building of Disneyland was made today with the announcement that a 160-acre site had been selected for the ambitious amusement center and living museum of Americana conceived by Walt Disney.
* * *
Disneyland, which will resemble a giant motion-picture set, is described by Mr. Disney as a “combination of a world’s fair, a playground, a community center, a museum of living facts and a show place of beauty and magic. Once you walk through its portals you leave today behind and enter a world of yesterday, tomorrow and Fantasy.”
* * *
“Disneyland,” he added, “will be based upon and dedicated to the ideals, the dreams and hard facts that created America. And it will be uniquely equipped to dramatize these dreams and facts and send them forth as a sort of courage and inspiration to all the world.”

Continue reading for the first mentions of Bobby Bowden, search engines and something called “Texlahoma.” (more…)

Every now and again, we head into the archives of The New York Times to find the first time the paper covered a particular topic. With the media offering non-stop coverage of his memorial service today, let’s look back at what the Times had to say about Michael Jackson when he was just getting started:

Michael Jackson

April 25, 1973

The Jackson Five, black and from Detroit, were the pioneers, and their weeny-bopper attraction is Michael, now aged 14, who at this year’s Academy Award ceremonies sang “Ben,” the only love song written so far to a real, live rat.

Merchandising right ahead, Michael’s recording company has recorded him as a solo artist. his latest album is Music and Me, which is a further example of his career direction. To have him sing such an emotive tearjerker as the old teen-age ballad “Too Young” is to move him far away from the Jackson Five’s early roots, which were solidly commercial rhythm and blues.
* * *
To pop purists, this may be regrettable, but commercially it is an astute move toward maturity and longevity. After all, Michael Jackson is 14 and already they are talking about how old David Cassidy (of the Partridge Family) appears to be to the teeny-boppers.

Keep reading for early reaction to ‘Thriller,’ Bubbles and more. (more…)

I just heard that the Sony Walkman turns 30 this week. To celebrate, let’s revisit the first time The New York Times gave it a mention, in an article titled “Stereo-to-Go – and Only You Can Hear”:

“Josh Lansing and the young blonde woman had never even met before, but as they passed each other on Madison Avenue the other afternoon, she waved and smiled and he tipped his headphones in salute….What the two well-dressed strangers first noticed about each other was that they were both possessors of the newest status symbol around town: the Walkman, a portable stereo unit (priced in most stores at $200), consisting of an ultra-light headphone set plugged into a cassette player that weighs in at less than 14 ounces, batteries included. ‘It’s just like Mercedes-Benz owners honking when they pass each other on the road,’ explained Mr. Lansing, whose cassette hung from his Gucci belt.”

Originally published July 7, 1980. You can read all the previous installments of ‘The First Time News Was Fit To Print’ here.

It’s time for another edition of The First Time News Was Fit To Print, the semi-regular feature where we travel into the archives of The New York Times to find the first time the paper covered various subjects. If you have a suggestion for a future installment, leave a comment.

Hubble Telescope

January 3, 1989

Delayed NASA Missions Prepare for Takeoff
In December the long-awaited Hubble Space Telescope is scheduled to be lofted into Earth orbit from a shuttle, giving astronomers not only a clearer view of the entire solar system but of stars and galaxies virtually all the way out to the edge of the observable universe. Scientists, barely containing their excitement, believe that the huge optical telescope should bring about a transformation in observational astronomy comparable to the one after the astronomer Galileo looked at the heavens with a telescope nearly four centuries ago.

Keep reading for LeBron James, CNN and more. (more…)

It’s time for another edition of The First Time News Was Fit To Print, the semi-regular feature where we travel into the archives of The New York Times and find the first time the paper covered various subjects. If you have a suggestion for a future installment, leave a comment.

Chat Rooms

June 20, 1993

Tomorrow’s TV: Will They Sit By The Set, Or Ride A Data Highway?
“It surprised us,” said Stephen M. Case, the company’s president, “to discover that our subscribers don’t look to America Online primarily as a source of information. They see it more as a chance to communicate with other subscribers.”

Subscribers can talk directly to one another in “chat rooms” — subnetworks in which up to two-dozen people can type comments to one another. One recent evening, for instance, a chat-room visitor could watch scrolling down the screen a conversation comparing the weather in Florida and Mississippi, which seemed an opportune time to break in and ask the people in the room why they subscribed to America Online. Answers immediately appeared.

“AOL manages to take a depersonalizing technology and make it personal via chat rooms like this,” replied someone going by the screen name of BRUX.

“It’s user friendly,” FIRECRKR typed. “Any idiot can use AOL, even this one! You don’t even have to know how to spll.”

Matt Lauer

April 18, 1993

The Anchor As Sex Symbol
NBC News seems to be producing a string of on-air heartthrobs. First, there was Arthur Kent. Then Stone Phillips. Now there’s Matt Lauer.

Mr. Lauer, the co-host, with Jane Hanson, of WNBC’s 6 A.M. newscast, Today in New York, recently substituted for Bryant Gumbel on the Today show for three days.

Does NBC have big plans for him? “I don’t think I would call it a tryout,” said the anchor, 35, who was born in Manhattan and grew up in Westchester County. “I would call it a great opportunity that was handed to me with no strings attached.”

Keep reading for the first mentions of peanut butter, garage door openers, Twitter, Bob Dylan and more.
(more…)

Clay Shirky is an adjunct professor of New Media at NYU. He writes about technology (okay, pretty much just the internet) and its effects on relationships and culture. Recently he posted a brilliant essay called Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable, about what happened to newspapers in the 90s, how they saw the internet coming (and what it meant for the newspaper’s business model), and what happened to those pragmatists who observed what was happening. In short, Shirky explains “the unthinkable scenario” for newspapers — the one in which the internet’s inherent strengths and behaviors (sharing content for free, reaching mass audiences on the cheap) would change the economic landscape for newspapers so much that none of their planned responses (micropayments, DRM, advertising, litigation) would work.

The piece opens (emphasis added):

Back in 1993, the Knight-Ridder newspaper chain began investigating piracy of Dave Barry’s popular column, which was published by the Miami Herald and syndicated widely. In the course of tracking down the sources of unlicensed distribution, they found many things, including the copying of his column to alt.fan.dave_barry on usenet; a 2000-person strong mailing list also reading pirated versions; and a teenager in the Midwest who was doing some of the copying himself, because he loved Barry’s work so much he wanted everybody to be able to read it.

One of the people I was hanging around with online back then was Gordy Thompson, who managed internet services at the New York Times. I remember Thompson saying something to the effect of “When a 14 year old kid can blow up your business in his spare time, not because he hates you but because he loves you, then you got a problem.” I think about that conversation a lot these days.

This is a really smart essay. Shirky knows what he’s talking about, and his writing is entertaining. Here’s one more key snippet:

The curious thing about the various plans hatched in the ’90s is that they were, at base, all the same plan: “Here’s how we’re going to preserve the old forms of organization in a world of cheap perfect copies!” The details differed, but the core assumption behind all imagined outcomes (save the unthinkable one) was that the organizational form of the newspaper, as a general-purpose vehicle for publishing a variety of news and opinion, was basically sound, and only needed a digital facelift. As a result, the conversation has degenerated into the enthusiastic grasping at straws, pursued by skeptical responses.

Read the rest for a smart look at newspapers in the online era.

(Photo courtesy of Flickr user Matt Callow, used under Creative Commons license.)

It’s time for another edition of The First Time News Was Fit To Print, where we travel into the archives of The New York Times and find the first time the paper covered various subjects. If you have a suggestion for a future installment, leave a comment.

Automated Teller Machines

October 9, 1975

Methods of Future Displayed Here; Exhibit Portends More Automation for Banking
Bankers are moving with all deliberate speed into the age of automation and electronics, if the exhibition accompanying the centennial convention of the American Bankers Association can be used as an indicator of industry trends.
* * *
James E. Lodge, director of operations, automated division of the A.B.A., said there were three forms of electronic funds-transfer systems: 1) Automated clearing house for checks. 2) Automated teller machines to make banking more convenient for customers. 3) Point-of-sale devices at store checkout counters.
* * *
While the electronic gear of the future purred, hummed and pinged, the hucksterism of earlier ages at many booths showed bankers how to bring the customer into the tent with premiums of Bibles, tennis racquets and hand-painted portraits.

Laptop

April 16, 1985

Portable Computers Show Signs of Losing Weight
Accompanied by much grunting, huffing and heaving, the first “portable” computers lumbered into the marketplace several years ago. Some of them weighed 30 pounds or more, hardly dainty enough to be carried gracefully while dashing through an airport, and they were priced as if they were worth their weight in gold.

While the pricetags of portables are still relatively fat, the computers themselves are becoming mere wisps, often weighing less than 10 pounds and small enough to slip inside a briefcase. These sleek models are called laptops, and more and more of them are showing up in classrooms, courtrooms, commuter trains and airport lounges.

There are now more than a dozen laptops on the market. Some have small display screens and no disk storage and can run all day on penlight batteries, while others have almost all the features of a desktop computer, including a voracious hunger for power. At least half a dozen others are on the drawing board, including the much rumored but vaporous “Clamshell” from International Business Machines.

Conan O’Brien

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Every now and again, I head into the online archives of The New York Times and dig up the first time the paper covered various topics. Here are 16 first mentions worth mentioning (again), from Princess Di to Archie Bunker, U2 to YouTube. If you’ve got a topic you’d like to see here, leave me a comment. Happy New Year!

Diana Spencer

December 15, 1980

For ‘Hounding’ a Friend of Charles, Press Is Chided
The latest round of feverish speculation about Prince Charles’s marriage prospects has touched off a new debate in Britain about the press and royal privacy.

Even Buckingham Palace, which normally says not a word about such things, has felt obliged to formally protest some of the recent speculation, and the mother of Lady Diana Spencer, the 19-year-old woman being mentioned as a possible royal bride, has indignantly accused the newspapers of printing lies and hounding her daughter.

“May I ask the editors of Fleet Street,” said Lady Diana’s mother, Frances Shand Kydd, in a letter published in The Times of London this month, “whether they consider it necessary or fair to harass my daughter daily, from dawn until well after dusk? Is it fair to ask any human being, regardless of circumstances, to be treated in this way?”
* * * * *
For weeks, her picture has been in the newspapers almost daily, accompanied by stories reporting such momentous news as the fact that she stalled her mini-car, a bright red Metro, in traffic and had trouble restarting it, or that she disclosed in an interview that she liked children, a trait that is presumably not unusual in a kindergarten teacher.

John McCain

July 31, 1967

Start of Tragedy: Pilot Hears a Blast As He Checks Plane
At 10:30am Saturday, Lieut. Comdr. John Sidney McCain 3d climbed aboard his A-4 Skyhawk for a mission over North Vietnam.

“I closed the canopy and started the plane and then went through the normal checks of the gauges and the settings,” the 30-year-old Navy pilot recalled today. “Suddenly I felt and heard an explosion. It was either my plane or the one to the right. Flames were everywhere.”

In the following moments aboard the aircraft carrier Forrestral, the 150-pound Annapolis graduate climbed out of the cockpit, stepped precariously onto the plane’s three-foot-long refueling pipe and then leaped onto the burning flight deck and ran.
* * * * *
The son and grandson of two noted admirals, Commander McCain has a disarming disregard for formal military speech or style. He is wiry, prematurely gray and does not take himself too seriously.

Keep reading for Yoko Ono, the personal computer, Mount Rushmore, Wayne Gretzky, Dave Matthews Band and more. (more…)

It’s time for another edition of The First Time News Was Fit To Print, where we head into the archives of The New York Times and find the first time the paper covered a particular subject. If you have a suggestion for a future installment, leave a comment. Here’s what we dug up this week:

General Motors

December 28, 1908

General Motors Co. Start Rumor Anew
The announcement last week of the formation, as a New Jersey corporation, of the General Motors Company, supposed to be the much-talked-of holding company which is to absorb all of the producers of low-priced cars in the automobile market, has created quite a flurry of interest. It is said that three-quarters of the stockholders of the Olds Motor Works at Lansing and a proportion of the Buick Motor Company of Flint, Mich., have already assented to a merger plan.
* * *
The basic idea behind the combination proposals has been the purchase of materials in quantities effecting a considerable saving in the cost of production, the distribution of the field so as to avoid competition in the production of cars of each given price, apportioning to each concern the type which it shall produce, and the limitation of it to that type.

Cellular Phones

May 26, 1982

Bell’s Cellular Radio Plans
The American Telephone and Telegraph Company informed the Federal Communications Commission today that it intends to stay in the new cellular radio business after its proposed divestiture of the 22 local telephone companies.

Cellular radio is a relatively new technology, developed over the past two decades by Bell Labs and others, that will provide an improved form of mobile and portable telephone service. The F.C.C. later this year will approve franchises to offer the new phone service in localities around the country … Local cellular phone service would be offered and maintained by the local phone companies as regulated businesses, according to present plans.
* * *
Unlike conventional mobile telephone systems, which have one large sending and receiving antenna, usually near the center of town, cellular systems have multiple antennas, with each serving one small geographic section or cell. As a vehicle moves through the city, its receiver obtains a signal from the closest antenna, handing off the customer from one cell to another as it moves through the streets.

(more…)

It’s time for another edition of The First Time News Was Fit To Print, where we head into the archives of The New York Times and find the first time the paper covered a particular subject. If you have a suggestion for a future installment, leave a comment. Here’s what we dug up this week:

Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade

November 26, 1924

Santa to Lead a Parade: Will Be Accompanied by Toyland Notables
Santa Claus, accompanied by several bands and a circus contingent made up of professionals and employees of R.H. Macy & Co., will parade six miles through the city Thanksgiving morning.
* * *
Santa, with his retinue of clowns, and prominent personages in toyland, such as Mother Goose, Little Red Riding Hood, Little Miss Muffet and the Three Men in the Tub, then will be escorted to the ground floor [of Macy's], where he will be crowned. Thereupon he will unveil Macy’s Christmas spectacle, “Fairyfolk Frolics in Wondertown.”

Jimmy Buffett

June 18, 1973

Andy Pratt Is Heard At Max’s Kansas City
Andy Pratt came in from New England to Max’s Kansas City, Park Avenue South, on Wednesday with a strong reputation as singer-songwriter. The unknown-genius-of-the-week spot is always a rough one, but by the end of Pratt’s first set that reputation of his had taken some bruising.
* * *
By contrast, the imagery of the country singer (and writer) Jimmy Buffett was clear and clean, rooted firmly in Buffett’s own existence. Buffett, who was backed up by a good harmonica player and a low-phosphate washboard scrubber, also dropped in some humor. Buffett looks outside and takes notes—Pratt takes the inner view and long way around.

Keep reading for Trivial Pursuit, Kwanzaa, the Dustbuster and more.
(more…)