“It’s an experiment in the future,” said Editor in Chief Maggie Canon at the time. “We realized that is where the future is — electronic publication.”

But a controlled, subscription-only environment such as Compuserve couldn’t fully prepare InfoWorld, or any publication, for the tidal wave of change that would sweep over the publishing industry in the early 1990s with the advent of the World Wide Web, which made text and graphical content available to anyone with a Web browser.

The Web transformed both the way information was transmitted, and readers’ expectations for it, said Sree Sreenivasan, a professor at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism.

Still, in the past decade, magazines and newspapers with both print and online components clung to processes that were designed around the rigid requirements of print publication, rather than flexible “always on” nature of the Internet, said Jay Rosen, a journalism professor at New York University and creator of NewAssignment.net.

Given the expensive proposition of having to maintain parallel print and online operations that serve different needs and the continued high cost of print publication, countless magazines and newspapers have been forced to consider abandoning print altogether.

More recent refinements in online information delivery, such as RSS (Really Simple Syndication), have accelerated the transformation of news consumption among readers. RSS — which allows Internet users to subscribe to news feeds from various Web sites, then aggregate them on the desktop — lets readers zero in on specific topics that interest them and filter out the rest.

In the same vein, technologies such as RSS have empowered a new generation of self-publishers — bloggers — to democratize the reporting process and provide readers with direct access to subject experts without the filter of editors and reporters. And some of those blogs have established competitive brands with substantial readerships, using nothing more than a PC, an Internet connection, and some free software to challenge established magazines and newspapers.

But technological change is nothing new to the field of journalism — and nothing to be feared, Rosen said.

“From the very first, journalism has been about communicating ideas across big territories. Technology — whether it be Roman roads or the global Internet — has always been part and parcel of the profession. That means when technology changes, journalism has always been forced to change, too.

“Journalism is an old practice that keeps getting rebuilt because the technology for doing it keeps changing,” Rosen said.