It's official:
McClatchy is retiring the "Nando" name in favor of McClatchy Interactive.
Few were online in the early 1990s when
Frank Daniels III, then executive editor of the
Raleigh News & Observer, created "NandO Land," a dial-up bulletin board system that initially focused on schoolchildren. Nando grew to embrace Internet connectivity in March 1994 -- the early days of Gopher and MUDs, services called Archie and Veronica, and a program called Mosaic that soon changed everything.
Over time, Nando evolved into the first serious, professional news site on the World Wide Web -- long before CNN, MSNBC, and other followers -- and one of the nation's first commercial dial-up Internet service providers. When the McClatchy Co. bought the
News & Observer in 1995, Nando's Internet savvy was thought to be a major factor (although the newspaper itself turned out to be a very smart buy).
As a global news provider, Nando was never particularly well situated, since it had to buy all of its content and had no big broadcast partner to promote it. McClatchy shut down the Nando Times and Nando SportsServer sites in 2003, long after Nando had been eclipsed by media giants with deep pockets.
In recent years the Nando name has been tied to Internet technology for newspapers offered as a sideline to Nando's core mission of supporting McClatchy's own properties. Now that the name is gone, it's curious that there is not even a
Wikipedia entry to memorialize it.
It would be more accurate to credit George Schlukbier as...
