JForum Ends: Where the Digital Pioneers Went to School
This is an Editor & Publisher story by Jim Rosenberg, published May 17, 2001, reporting the end of the Journalism Forum on CompuServe. JForum was merged with CompuServe‘s PR Forum into a new service called MediaPro, and the old forum stopped operating.
Rosenberg’s account is a short obituary for something that mattered a great deal to a small number of people. JForum began, as he wrote, on a Radio Shack laptop:
Launched on a Radio Shack laptop in 1985, the then-300-baud journalists’ computer bulletin board eventually served thousands of members worldwide, with job listings and messaging in four languages on a variety of topics.
It was also, the story notes, the first online home of the Society of News Design, the National Press Photographers Association, Investigative Reporters and Editors, and other organizations — and the subject of an early ’90s ruling in which a U.S. judge found CompuServe not responsible for messages it was unaware of that were posted in JForum.
Former NBC News manager Jim Cameron, who started the forum, said he
founded JForum … for the dwindling number of radio news people to share survival tips.
He credited the section leaders and assistants “who really ran JForum as editors.” I was one of them, and Rosenberg quoted me at some length about what made the place work — the effort required to participate at all, and what that effort produced:
You really had to commit to be a member of this community. At that point, you realized the possibility of community was not a geographical issue … It was about shared interest.
And on what its closing meant:
This is a passing of a forefather of a lot of what is going on right now. This was an educational experience for the digital pioneers. This is where we went to school. We learned from each other.
The story closes by noting that Cameron would stay on in an interim capacity, with MediaPro to be operated by PR Forum’s Mike Bayer. Rosenberg was then a senior editor covering newspaper technology for E&P.
