Zatso

» see zatso.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

The most-cited warning in English about personalized news was written about a company that had already shut down. Cass Sunstein's Republic.com came out of Princeton in 2001, and the chapter everybody remembers is the one about the Daily Me, the paper that contains only what you asked for. Among his first examples: "Zatso.com allows users to produce 'a personal newscast.' Its intention is to create a place 'where you decide what's news.'" The categories he lists are sports, weather, crime, health and government. Those are exactly the topic names in Zatso's own URLs, which the Internet Archive still holds, so the description reads like somebody who had sat down and used the thing. By the time the book reached shelves it was gone.

Zatso was founded in 1998 by Roger Keating under the name ReacTV, and what it did was more industrial than the pitch suggests. It took the finished newscast off a local television station, cut it into individual stories, encoded each one for the web, and hosted the lot on its own servers. The station got a link. The viewer got a page where you ticked off the topics you cared about and Zatso strung the matching clips into a bulletin that ran start to finish, which in 2000 was a strange thing to watch a browser do.

The Zatso-branded version launched on 1 February 2000, free and advertiser-supported. The national content came from Reuters and the Weather Channel, with Court TV and Ivanhoe Broadcast News alongside them, and the local end came from station groups including E.W. Scripps, Meredith, Media General and Waterman Broadcasting. Keating's launch quote was about the structural problem: broadcasters had always had to dish out the same stories in the same order to everyone, and Zatso was closing the gap between the news people want and the news people get. The company passed a hundred employees and went live in twenty markets.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ friday the twentieth ~

It lasted into the autumn. The downsizing came first, cutting the total staff to thirty-eight about two weeks before the end, and on Friday 20 October 2000 the editorial operation stopped. Broadcasting & Cable had it the following Monday. Craig Marrs, the VP for development and affiliate relations, gave them the line that goes in the file on this whole year: "Clearly, we're all disappointed that the market downturn hit our business the way it did."

The stations found out they had been outsourcing more than they realized. Marrs again, on what the affiliates had actually been buying: "All they had to do was link to it, and now those stations will have to find someone else to do that work." Media General's new media director said they would need to explore their options for aggregation, which had been the key element of the service. A Scripps-Howard spokesperson put it plainly, that they just would not be able to offer the personalized aggregated content. The technical side of Zatso stayed up for roughly three more weeks, helping stations keep their video streaming without the part that chose what to stream, while the company shopped the technology around.

~ what the archive kept ~

The crawl record is unusually good for a company this short-lived, because the Internet Archive was hitting the site hourly through 2000. The useful residue is in the query strings. Every stored URL carries the call letters of the station whose newscast it was assembling from: KSHB in Kansas City, WFLA in Tampa, WJTV in Jackson, WNEM in Saginaw, WGNX in Atlanta, KPHO in Phoenix. Alongside those sit per-station subdomains in the form wgnx.vnp.zatso.com, which is Zatso running a white-label newsroom video operation under somebody else's brand. The rename turns out to have been skin deep as well: in October 2000, eight months after the Zatso launch, the thumbnail images on a Zatso page were still being served from www.reactv.com.

The topic IDs are in there too, numbered rather than named: Crime is 2, Government and Politics local is 20, Weather 40, Business 60, Technology 80, Health 120, Family 140, Sports 160, Entertainment 180, Consumer 200, Top Stories 220, national politics 240, Emergencies 280. A reader in 2000 picked from that list and got a newscast. A reader in 2026 picks from a feed and does not get asked.

The last working page the archive holds is from 13 December 2000, two months after the shutdown, served by whatever was left of the technical side. There is not a single capture of zatso.com anywhere in 2001. When it reappears, in July 2002, the domain is a bare frameset pointing at a site called enstuff.com, and the title tag is empty.

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