Talk:StarText

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I know that the StarText staff had a heads-up on the emerging technology of the Internet, because I told them about it at a couple of StarTexan meetings in 1989 and 1990. I encouraged them to incorporate Usenet and Internet content into their offerings, and essentially become an ISP for the StarTexan community. The response? They'd had a look at this Internet thing, and thought that their content model was superior and there wasn't any reason to spend their time on that Internet stuff. They had some notion that newspapers across the country would follow their lead, and the online experience of the future was just going to be a lot more of what they had already been providing. As noted in the article, this was not a winning strategy. (Wesley R. Elsberry, 11:01 AM PDT 20 March 2006)

I'm surprised it's not mentioned in the article that StarText provided a free internet email address to subscribers. This was one of the first times that access to internet email was available to the average person. Art Carnage (talk) 21:23, 22 February 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I managed StarText for several years. I left in 1998 a couple of years after Knight-Ridder purchased the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. When we started trying to move to the internet the newspaper was owned by Cap Cities/ABC. It took a couple of years to make the case necessary to get the funding for web servers and other equipment needed. The entire staff had to be re-trained to learn how to use the new technologies. It was wonderful and exciting work. The primary thing that was superior about the old local dial-up business model was the accountability of the user. There wasn't any anonymity with that system. Moving to the internet meant loosing that and we weren't at all sure that anonymity would enhance the news business. Time has proven that anonymity of uses is, indeed, a problem. Also, time proved the inevitability of moving to the new environment. Emarla (talk) 18:22, 6 July 2018 (UTC)[reply]