Sixteen years ago, close to midnight on Jan. 19, 1996, The New York Times flipped the switch on its full website. The exact date has been unclear: Bernard Gwertzman, then editor of The New York Times on the Web, recalled in 2001 that the site went up on Jan. 20, but the Times Co. corporate website says it was Jan. 19.
Adding to the confusion is a story published on Jan. 22, 1996, which stated, “The New York Times begins publishing daily on the World Wide Web today, offering readers around the world immediate access to most of the daily newspaper’s contents.”
Eileen Murphy, the Times’ vice president of corporate communications, tells me by email that the website went live the night of the 19th, a Friday. “That first weekend was intended as a ‘soft launch,’ which is why the Peter Lewis piece ran on Monday, January 22, 1996. That first Monday was when daily updates to the site began,” she said. “The confusion between the 19th and 20th was probably a result of the fact that the site went online just before midnight on the 19th. We consider the official anniversary date to be January 19.”
Five years after the website launched, Gwertzman and Martin Nisenholtz, then CEO New York Times Digital, recalled the struggles and expectations of publishing on the Web those first few years.
The Pope was first. The Times published its “first real published thing” on the Web in October 1995, a feature about the Pope’s visit to New York, according to Nisenholtz and Gwertzman. “It was really an exercise of the publishing system more than anything,” Nisenholtz said. “And I’ll never forget. The thing went up and we were very happy with it. And I got a call from the fellow who was running the [Times] company at the time, screaming at me about how it didn’t have any ads in it.”
They soon learned that the Web doesn’t wait. Gwertzman recalled: “We had a small staff, and all we could do was put up The New York Times without much graphics, and we tried [to] update the news twice a day, noon and at six o’clock we had a guy named J.C. Bouis from AP who did that. And then we soon found out that, in fact, you couldn’t wait. If some big story broke at three o’clock, you couldn’t wait till six o’clock. And we went ahead with it.”
At first, content on the Web wasn’t that different. Nisenholtz recalled: “I thought, again, naively, that the combination of sound, video, animation, the ability of the medium to be much more plastic or elastic than the newspaper is would define its character, and I also felt that code itself, the software itself would be insinuated into the news reports in a way that allowed users to manipulate them as they were reading them … The one thing that I was very wrong on early on was the need for this kind of content. … I just thought that it was going to be very exciting to create a new kind of journalism that would use the medium much more interactively and much more richly than simply taking the text reports out of the Atex systems and pouring them on line.”
Why they didn’t charge. Nisenholtz: “The consumer was going to change relatively slowly, and we needed to get every possible reason for users to come on to the Web site, that our competitors weren’t charging, and CNN was up and running and MS-NBC had announced this new cable network, and they were going to come up and running, and the Washington Post had announced, and USA Today, and, so, everybody was coming onto the Web and nobody was going to charge anything. And, so, we wanted to be a meaningful brand in this area, a meaningful news presence, and to do that, we felt we had to take away those charges and build the business model based on other fees, including, of course, the most prominent one, advertising.”
From the beginning, people used the website differently from the newspaper. Nisenholtz said that people read the paper slowly, “whereas on the Web, it’s fast, it’s quick. It’s people get in. They get out. They don’t really experience it in a way that I think is relaxing. You know, people relax in front of the television. And they sit back in a chair and they read the newspaper. The PC doesn’t have that kind of mode. It’s an active device, and it’s extremely uncomfortable. Now, some people can sit around and surf, you know, for hours and hours and hours. But that’s a different experience than reading.” (This was years before the iPad cemented the need for a “lean-back” digital device.)
Bloggers were pushing into the newspaper’s turf. Nisenholtz: “I think one of the more interesting trends in the last couple of months have been the emergence of bloggers. And you know, bloggers, of course, are Web sites that are written by amateurs. And some of them are beginning to resemble on-line newspapers. … So, you know, we ought to look at that, and we ought to continue to look at how amateurs, so-called amateurs, whether they’re our users or people who have just a deep and abiding interest in something can use this medium to publish, because it distributes out the expertise that people in our audience have …”
Times digital trivia buffs can read the whole story to see more, such as how the Times reacted to Princess Diana’s death in 1997 and how the website was hacked in 1998.
Notable dates in the Times’ digital history
Jan 19 or 20, 1996: The website launches.
Jan. 22, 1996: The Times announces that it would now publish daily to its website, named “The New York Times on the Web.”
Nov. 12, 1996: The Internet Archive saves its first image of the Times home page. A line at the bottom of the home page instructs users, “P L E A S E O P E N Y O U R W I N D O W T O T H E W I D T H O F T H I S L I N E O F T E X T.”
June 25, 2000: The Times starts a continuous news operation, “providing updated news and analysis around the clock.”
Dec 1, 2000: New York Times on the Web wins one of the inaugural Online Journalism Awards for its series “How Race is Lived in America.”
Sept 19, 2005: Times starts its TimeSelect service, charging $49.95 a year to access columnists and archives.
April 3, 2006: A redesigned website launches, offering better navigation and “serendipity” in the form of lists of most-emailed and most-blogged articles.
Sept. 7, 2006: A mobile version of website launches.
March 2, 2007: Times developer Jacob Harris sets up the Times’ Twitter account @nytimes on a computer under his desk as a way to see how quickly he could deliver Times headlines to his cell phone.
March 27, 2007: The company releases Times Reader.
Sept 19, 2007: Times cancels TimeSelect. At the time, an executive says the paper didn’t realize how much of their traffic would come from search. The next time the company charges for digital content, they account for traffic from search and social media.
Oct. 1, 2007: @nytimes Twitter account passes 1,000 followers. (It now has more than 4.3 million.)
Jan. 22, 2008: The Times breaks news of Heath Ledger’s death on its City Room blog. The post gets 1.78 million page views, at that point the most viewed article in the history of the Times website, recalled Jennifer 8. Lee in an essay about the Times’ digital transition.
March 10, 2008: “The metro desk broke the Eliot Spitzer prostitution scandal in 2008 with a Web-first mentality; despite the lamentation of at least one veteran editor who said scoops should be saved for the print edition, the paper stayed with a Web-first mentality, breaking one development after another online,” Lee recalled.
July 10, 2008: iPhone application launches.
Sept. 26, 2008: A presidential candidate debate is the first live video stream on the Times home page.
January 20, 2010: The Times announces that it will start charging for online access in 2011.
March 28, 2011: Times subscription model goes live in the U.S. after launching earlier that month in Canada.
May 23, 2011: Times social media editors experiment with posting manually to the @nytimes Twitter account rather than feeding it automated headlines.
The New York Times Co. timeline was used for some dates and information.
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