Newsbytes News Network, called "an Associated Press for tech-information junkies" was founded in May, 1983 in San Francisco, California by broadcast journalist Wendy Woods Gorski, who remained editor in chief for the 19 years. Continually published from 1983 to 2002, Newsbytes covered breaking news in consumer technology including computing, interactive media, telecommunications and cybersecurity, spanning the formative years of Silicon Valley and the advent of personal computers.

The Washington Post Company acquired Newsbytes in 1997. The archive of Newsbytes stories is currently on the Lexis-Nexis research database under the code NWSBYT

Predating the Internet, Newsbytes News Network came to be considered a “boot camp“ for online journalism. Its alumni have gone on to work for CNet, ZDNet, The Wall Street Journal, Reuters, and The New York Times.

At the height of its popularity in the mid-1990s, Newsbytes was published by over 180 media outlets and produced almost 100 technology news reports daily. Its success was buoyed by enthusiasm for news about emerging technologies. Newsbytes was able to offer instantaneous delivery of technology information before the invention of the Internet.

Wendy Woods Gorski had the idea to create an online publication out of what she was already writing daily for her broadcast news position in San Francisco. As a reporter and editor working under the name "Wendy Woods," she compiled news leads for her assignment editors at CNN (San Francisco Bureau) and KGO-TV (ABC) in 1982 and realized these news story ideas could be of interest to the general public. These summaries included contact information for the sources.

Newsbytes officially launched in 1983 as a "user publishing" feature on an online service called The Source, owned by Reader’s Digest, based in McLean, Virginia. "Newsbytes", began to earn royalties and an audience.

In its first few years, the weekly stories were written with a style that reflected television writing: succinct stories with an irreverent flair. "(Newsbytes) reflected her personality. It was, in some ways, the very first blog. It was infused with her being and when I joined her in 1985 I took that lesson to heart, putting my personality into my own work from Atlanta", said Dana Blankenhorn, one of the service’s early writers.

By the end of the first year Steve Gold, a journalist in Sheffield, England, joined the company and contributed European technology news. Gradually the service evolved from summaries to fleshed-out stories and included the work of multiple reporters in different US cities and countries.