Pioneering the Newspaper’s Move Online

When I inherited control of the New Mexico State student newspaper in May 1995, I had nothing.

When I say “nothing,” I mean nothing. Renovations nearly shuttered the student union building that summer, and all Round Up possessions (save a desk or two) sat somewhere in university storage.

The first-ever media advisor was yet to be hired, and the staff business manager had been let go as that position shifted to two student workers.

I did have a budget for the year. And that budget called for an online editor.

I’m not sure that I knew exactly what that meant. At home, we had CompuServe a couple of years earlier, and I had e-mailed the two people I knew with e-mail addresses. I also played around with those weird things like Archie and Gopher. But I certainly had never done anything akin to what would be called “surfing” today.

When the newly constructed media wing opened, we had network connections built it. I vividly remember sitting in my office the day that the network techs brought that first Ethernet cable and installed some early version of Netscape.

We were captivated, entering www dot anything-we-could-think-of dot com.

What we didn’t find were any student newspapers online. Certainly there were none in New Mexico.  Memory suggests that my future employer, the Albuquerque Journal, wasn’t even online yet.

We posted an ad with student employment services, and amazingly we got a couple of applications. It’s hard to imagine having that much foresight as to be qualified to be an online editor in 1995, but there were some.

We ended up hiring Jerome Parks, an engineering major. Not surprisingly, there were no qualified journalism students.

Jerry coded a relatively simple set of pages with our “flag,” and a unique page for each story. The home page linked to each issue. There was this light brown paper looking background with little round red gif buttons for each link. Sadly I don’t have the exact date that we went live, but it was during the fall semester, as Jerry was teaching me to code my own HTML pages at this time 13 years ago.

I thought of this recently as I ran across @nicklongo on Twitter. He was a real Internet pioneer, and he clearly saw far more potential than we ever did (check out his bio here).

It’s funny looking backward as the newspaper business model currently crashes around the industry.

I’m not sure what we saw of the future. But it wasn’t this.

We were just happy to get Letters to the Editor via e-mail so we didn’t have to retype them.

We struggled then with the idea of online ads, and I’m not sure whether we ever sold any during those first 18 months.

But the online edition was a novelty. I suppose that’s the difference between a dot com visionary and the rest of us.

The Internet caught up quickly. Just two years after I took over the paper, I really wanted to go work for ABCNews.com in New York City. But I had already accepted a position with the Dow Jones Newspaper Fund summer editing internship program, and that propelled my brief career in print journalism.

Looking back, it’s difficult to capture the sense of really having been a pioneer  — albeit a pioneer without much vision. To my knowledge, we were the first online newspaper in the state.

It’s just a strange feeling to have been a part of something without having really known it.

We had no analytics, and I have no idea what the traffic was. But it was fun to be an early adopter. I just wish that I had a better feel at the time for what we were adopting.

Tagged as: Internet, journalism, newspaper