Seemingly always strapped for sufficient funding, ABC News was rarely a pioneer user of expensive new technologies. It adopted the use of videotape and color transmission after its competitors. By the middle years of the first decade of the twenty-first century, ABC NewsOne was the net- work’s affiliate news service. It provided regional, national, and international news to ABC affiliates and foreign networks. ABC News Now was ABC’s 24/7 news channel available online and from other sources such as mobile phones.

 

A news brief containing information relevant to college students was shown every hour on MtvU. ABC News segments were packaged or customized for broadcast over Wal-Mart’s in-store television network. Its “i-Caught” website encouraged viewers to upload video of newsworthy items, celebrity sightings, or amusing ephemera. In 2006, ABC News Radio initiated an Internet-delivered FM news service aimed especially at younger audiences. And ABC News offered both RSS feeds and podcasts.

 

Few Americans cited the First Amendment’s prohibition of government abridgement of speech, or even proposed a right to access media for the first hundred years of U.S. legal history. The beginnings of free speech jurisprudence in the United States were not encouraging. For example, Thomas Patterson, a U.S. senator and newspaper publisher in Colorado, was charged with criminal contempt for criticizing a court decision in his home state that reversed a Denver election.