Newspapers missed Bingham's warnings

Addressing his classmates at their 25th college reunion, Barry Bingham Jr. predicted that by the time they met for their 50th, "most of what we read will be transmitted into our homes or offices electronically." This was a strange thing to say in 1981, when the revolution in personal computers had scarcely begun and no one had heard the words "World Wide Web." Unlike almost everyone else in the media industry back then, Bingham anticipated the coming era of electronic news, and he was genuinely excited about it. He believed newspapers could save themselves from extinction -- but only if they adapted early and intelligently to new technology. but newspaper people are a crusty lot, and Gutenberg's technology, with a few tweaks over the centuries, had held up well enough for most. Bingham would buttonhole colleagues at meetings, where they grumbled that he was distracting from what they considered their business: getting news onto paper and into a reader's hands.