From 2001 to 2002, Howard Finberg wrote “Digital Output,” a regular column in the Tech News section of Editor & Publisher, the newspaper industry’s trade journal. Bylined “By Howard I. Finberg” and published under his role as managing director of Finberg-Gentry, the Digital Futurist Consultancy, the column tracked the technologies reshaping how newspapers produced and distributed their journalism at the start of the 2000s.
The column’s beat was broad by design: Acrobat and early XML publishing workflows, wireless networking (802.11b, Bluetooth) reaching newsrooms and pressrooms alike, the fading relevance of newspaper trade shows in an Internet age, circulation systems that still couldn’t talk to online e-commerce, TabletPCs and other mobile-computing prototypes, and the press and production technology decisions editors were rarely consulted on. Individual installments drew on conferences (DEMO, DemoMobile, Nexpo, Ifra Expo), industry research (Pew, Forrester, the Online News Association), and Finberg’s own conversations with editors, executives, and vendors.
This series collects individual “Digital Output” columns as archival documents, each attached as the original scanned Editor & Publisher page alongside a short summary and verbatim excerpts.