Somehow my New Year’s Day web browsing stumbled on a 10 year-old article from the Nieman Foundation at Harvard about the 20th anniversary of The New York Times going online, which inspired me to share it and write this personal note — first as a Facebook post for friends and veterans of World Wide Web news publishing, but expanded here with a ridiculous number of links. The Nieman article was so Times-centric that I felt other organizations deserved to be mentioned, including a couple that I worked for…

Adding 10 to that story‘s headline… Just 30 years ago today, Jan. 1, 1996, The New York Times joined the The News & Observer in Raleigh, NC; The Columbus Dispatch, Silicon Valley’s The Mercury News, SFGATE, USA TODAY, The Boston Globe, *Soundings Magazine and other pioneer “newspapers on the World Wide Web.”

It dawns on me that I actually published New York Times stories online before the Times did! I was hired in December 1994 as a part-time “shovelware” editor at the Raleigh News & Observer, updating wire-service stories on the N&O’s 24/7 “NandO Times” website during weekend mornings & grad school vacations.
Here’s what 1996 NandO looked like, thanks to the Internet Archive, although some images and animations were not preserved.

The NY Times News Service wire was one of our sources, at least in the beginning, along with Reuters, Associated Press, Agence France-Presse, Bloomberg and many others. As you can see from that last Times link and the image below, the Times wire was not just for front-page news. (I do not remember posting that story myself. In fact, I’d forgotten about that NandoTimes “Third Rave” section for off-beat news until I found it at the Internet Archive.)

Often a disparaging term, our “shovelware” work consisted of writing headlines, editing, and sorting updated wire service content into world, nation, sports, business, opinion and 11 other sections, updating stories as quickly as possible, almost 24 hours a day. To avoid having to be up before dawn to drive to Raleigh, I sometimes used a wire-editing terminal in the Chapel Hill News N&O bureau for my early-morning shift, overlapping with another editor in Raleigh. However, beyond shovelware, the N&O really was a pioneer, not just a republisher. It even sold dialup network access and managed a local bulletin board before the Web began. Later, withnando.net established as a separate brand, the N&O was posting its original North Carolina content at newsobserver.com. While I was there, those stories included a 1996 Pulitzer-winning “Boss Hog” expose about pork production, which involved computer-assisted investigative reporting. The company had been sold to California’s McClatchy chain in 1995, which eventually turned the former NandO Times into sections of its other newspaper websites.

As much of a pioneer as the News & Observer was, it wasn’t the first “online newspaper” by a long shot, although it was one of the first on the World Wide Web, and one of the first to attempt an “updated 24/7” format. But the Columbus Dispatch, USA Today and San Jose Mercury News were the first “online newspapers” I’d read, years before the World Wide Web existed. Using commercial services like CompuServe and Prodigy, they were online in the 1980s, becoming well positioned to join the World Wide Web when the 1993 Mosaic and 1994 Netscape browsers made photo-illustrated news sites possible.

*Soundings, “the nation’s boating newspaper,” where I’d worked for from 1989 to 1993 was also ready to go online early — and make money at it — because publisher Jack Turner started converting his classified ad section (boats and waterfront real estate) to a database format with dial-in access in mind. Just as I was leaving in ’93 to apply to grad schools, I wrote him a report on Prodigy, CompuServe and BBS database software for his ad-listings project. Along came Mosaic and Netscape, and in 1995 Soundings went online. I wrote the cover story package without leaving Chapel Hill. In 1997 Turner and his business partner cashed in, selling the company. Soundings and its spin-off business magazine, Soundings Trade Only, are still afloat. Retired, Turner even started a local news blog or two in Connecticut during the last years of his life; R.I.P., Jack.

Footnote: Sadly, I was called away before I could add more images to this article. I did save a few additional image-captures from the Internet Archive collection of Nando Times pages, so maybe someday I’ll remember to put them here. The Web is never finished!