This is an interoffice memo I wrote at the Poynter Institute in January 2004, proposing a seminar to mark — and, more usefully, to learn from — the first 10 years of news on the Web. It went to Karen Dunlap, Janet Weaver, Paul Pohlman, Bill Mitchell and Al Tompkins, with copies to a number of colleagues working on Poynter Online and News University.
The premise was simple:
Anniversaries are important. We mark milestones so we can celebrate the past and look towards the future.
I laid out a short list of the dates that felt like the founding moments of online news: Access Atlanta launching on Prodigy in March 1994, the Raleigh News and Observer’s NandoTimes in July 1994, Poynter going online with a BBS in December 1994, Mercury Center Web in January 1995 (“complete with advertising”), USA Today’s dial-up service in April 1995, and the announcement that same month of New Century Network by eight major newspaper publishing companies.
But nostalgia wasn’t the point. What we had come to accept as conventional wisdom by 2004 had been paid for the hard way:
What we take as “conventional wisdom” however, did not start out that way. Hard lessons were learned. These lessons provide the foundations for the development of a new form of journalism and a new type of information medium.
The proposed format borrowed from Poynter’s “Planning Your Election Coverage” seminar — a mix of industry leaders and working managers, plus some of the pioneers of the field as participants and speakers. The session ideas ranged from the evolution of journalism on the Web to what readers actually wanted from news sites, convergence, the new EyeTrack research, credibility and ethics, changing media habits, “Sight and sound: the emerging Web senses,” and the interactivity challenge I titled “You provide, but I drive.”
I also wanted the seminar to be more than a room in St. Petersburg. The idea was to extend the conversation before and after the in-person meeting using News University as a platform, carry the teaching into Poynter Online, and possibly publish a special Poynter Report as a handbook “to guide online journalism into the next 10 years.”
The postscript is my favorite part of the memo. Just after I finished writing, Robin Sloan posted an item to Convergence Chaser about New York Times Digital CEO Martin Nisenholtz speaking about… Pong. Nisenholtz argued that nytimes.com would evolve
from sorting, distributing and making accessible content created principally for other formats, to creating content that is native to the computing world from which we evolved.
My reaction, in the memo: we needed to bring him to Poynter to explore what “native content” meant for journalists and journalism.
Reading this now, the milestone list looks impossibly early and the questions look impossibly current. We’re well past Web+30, and we are still arguing about credibility, about who drives the experience, and about what content native to a new platform actually looks like — only now the platform is generative AI rather than the browser.