Could it be almost thirty years ago that The New York Times launched nytimes.com? According to their own article, the official start date was January 22, 1996. The site went on to become a pioneer in high-quality news online. It’s not just the quality of the reporting, either. The site was one of the first to try to echo the look of a print edition. The team worked extremely hard and given the technology of the day, it was an impressive accomplishment.
The look and feel of real news
Keep in mind that at the time, most news web sites looked something like this:
Now, there’s nothing wrong with that, per se. It just doesn’t look like a newspaper. That may not be a dealbreaker today, but back then, newspapers were the way people got in-depth reporting. The internet was still sort of a fad, not something serious.
That’s why it was impressive that the Times went to the trouble to make their page look like this.
It may not look like much today but when I spoke to one of the creators of the site (he even appears in the picture at the top of the Times article) he told me it was a convoluted mess of what we think of today as outdated technologies. Fonts on the web were unheard of, and graphics had to be small in order to load quickly over a .05 megabit connection.
In order to make the web page look anything like the print version, the entire page, even the text, had to be turned into web-safe graphics. That was no small feat in the mid-1990s. I’ll vouch for that myself, as I was doing that same sort of work at that time.
Why this was all so important
This wasn’t the first online news source and it wasn’t the first newspaper to go online, both of those things are true. But you have to think back to the 1990s to realize what a media giant the Times was at that point. CNN was less than a decade old and was still scrambling for credibility. There was no better place to get the kind of news the Times was known for — solid, well-researched reporting. That may still be true… so many sources today try to be first without making sure they’re right.
Today, we take for granted that we can find out anything we want, perhaps even in too much detail, with just a tap of the glass in our hands. Back in 1996 all of this was just a theory, and not guaranteed to succeed. When an organization like The New York Times decided to take the internet seriously, it meant that we all had to take it seriously.
Of course, we all know what happened next. Newspapers faded in the 21st century, as their print schedule couldn’t keep up with demands for instant news. News gathering itself changed, as the world began to value folks on the ground with phones more than dedicated journalists. One well-researched point of view turned into a million voices on social media. It’s hard to know if we’re really better off.
I’ll tell you, though, none of it would have happened if the Times hadn’t gone online.
