For last year’s elections, major newspaper web sites introduced such innovations as issues tracking and geotagged election watches, evidently unaware that these very tools had been introduced by Evans Witt and others back in 1996 on the first newspaper election web sites, when new media were really new. Some sites even had audio and video clips in 1996. OK, video over dialup was pretty jerky, but it was there, 13 years ago, the dog walking on its hind legs.

Now we see print editors gearing up for tablet computers, as reported this week by the New York Times. The Times even describes a “consortium” of publishers to try to drive standards.

“Should the standards be set by the hardware industry, or should the publishers help the hardware industry create the proper standards?” the Times quotes John Squires, described as interim managing director of the consortium.

John Squires, meet Roger Fidler.

Over a decade ago, Roger Fidler developed a tablet-based standard for newspapers and magazines for – yes – a consortium of publishers. Funded by the Gannett Foundation, Fidler’s early- to mid-1990s design work is almost exactly what is being reinvented fifteen years later. But from what I can see, Roger’s design is cleaner, and both the articles and the ads are more interactive.

(Disclosure: Roger and I were colleagues at Gannett Foundation’s Media Studies Center at Columbia University, later renamed the Freedom Forum Media Studies Center, where I was Director of Technology Studies.)

MSC Executive Director Ev Dennis, who now runs the Center for Communications at Fordham, and John Pavlik, who was my predecessor at MSC and now chairs Rutgers’ Department of Journalism and Media Studies, were also early supporters of Roger’s tablet design research, and they could write an authoritative history.

If you are interested in more of Roger’s work, he’s now at the University of Missouri. And if you are in the neighborhood, he can show you his fifteen-year-old tablets. They’re probably in a museum.

Why does the news industry keep retracing its technological tracks?

In my interviews, it’s clear that turnover is so complete in the online world that there is no institutional memory of what these same organizations developed in the last decade. Those who don not know the history of media technology truly are doomed to repeat it.

P.S. If you want to see some of those 1996 election news sites, pick up a copy of Lethargy ’96, the book I co-authored with the late John Mashek of the Boston Globe and Larry McGill, who is now at Princeton. It has descriptions of the top ten news sites, along with usage stats and screen shots for October-November 1996. The designs of some web sites haven’t changed much since then. The book is out of print, but I hear it’s on eBay for much more than we ever would have thought to charge for it.