Doug Ahlers is the co-founder of Modem Media, an interactive advertising and marketing agency. He has been involved in the development and deployment of online services from the first experiments with interactive technology through the explosion of the Internet as a mass medium. Mr. Ahlers helped build the first online shopping site and the first online travel site. He also built the first commercial website on the Internet and created the first banner ad to appear on the Internet. Through his work at Modem Media, Ahlers created comprehensive Internet strategies for Fortune 500 companies. Modem Media subsidiary Poppe Tyson created the first website for the White House and also created the spin-off company DoubleClick, Inc. After the sale of Modem Media, Mr. Ahlers started two venture capital firms in the technology arena. He received his master’s degree in journalism at Louisiana State University in 1983. While at the Shorenstein Center, he worked on a book that examined the societal and political impact of new technologies.
News Consumption and the New Electronic Media
January 1, 2006
A paper by Douglas Ahlers, spring 2005 fellow, looks at the hypothesized shift of news consumption from the traditional media to the online news media. Ahlers argues that the hypothesized mass migration of news consumption behavior is not supported by the facts. Two-thirds of the U.S. adult population had not shifted to online news consumption
