Women Were Digital Media Pioneers, but There’s Still a Gender Gap There

By: Meg Heckman | Columbia Journalism Review

USA Today launched its first website just days before the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, and its staff helped create a new kind of crisis storytelling in the aftermath. Rapid updates, photos, and story indexes made the Web, for the first time in human history, a significant source of information for understanding national tragedy.

Two years later, another major paper continued to shape our understanding of online news when a Web producer at Philly.com assembled the multimedia version of Black Hawk Down. On the West Coast, meanwhile, the San Jose Mercury News unveiled Good Morning Silicon Valley in the mid-1990s, and it quickly became a popular proto-blog focused on the booming tech industry.