I remember it like it was yesterday, even though it was a quarter of a century ago: The day the Globe and Mail newspaper in Toronto flipped the switch (or switches) and a live news website suddenly appeared at globeandmail.com. Imagine — actual news being posted on the internet directly from computers! It was a spectacular thing at the time, real groundbreaking stuff — although as I am writing about it I feel the same way I do when I tell my children that we used to have a dial phone and a party line (ask your grandparents about that last one). The launch was five years after a colleague and I mocked up a website using borrowed HTML and showed it to some of the senior editors at the paper, as an illustration of what we might be able to do if we got on the old information superhighway. The New York Times was getting online, I said, as well as smaller entrepreneurial papers like the News and Observer. There was little to no interest. After all, the internet was a plaything for nerds, not a place where real people did real things!
Not surprisingly, I like to describe this story in a way that makes me seem like a visionary and the Globe like a stodgy stick-in-the-mud (which it was, of course). But in addition to uncertainty about the whole internet thing — and a marked preference for proprietary solutions like Pointcast — there were other business considerations in play as well, as my former boss Ed Greenspon hints at in his LinkedIn post recalling the launch (which was apparently codenamed Rowboat, something I didn’t know until today). At the time, the Globe had a very lucrative deal selling something called InfoGlobe — an old-fashioned text database of news stories — to corporate customers and libraries for huge sums of money, and no one wanted to kill the goose that laid the golden eggs by messing around with some nerdy vision of access for everyone via the Interweb. Also, the Globe was in the midst of a bitter newspaper war with Conrad Black’s National Post, and all the publisher cared about was getting more people reading the paper version.
Somehow, despite all these obstacles, and thanks to the efforts of Ed and Neil Campbell and a host of others, the site went live on this day in 2000. It looks comical now, the height of late 1990s web design (below is a somewhat blurry printout of what it looked like on launch day, courtesy of Kenny Yum), but it was a magical thing. I wrote a launch column in which I said the internet was the best thing to happen to journalism since the typewriter. I believed it at the time, and in some ways I still believe it — even though I have seen in the years since that launch all the myriad ways in which both journalists and non-journalists can foul that nest. But at the time, we knew nothing about Gamergate, or 4chan, or Russia’s Internet Research Agency, or the fact that in the future, people would use the internet primarily to start fights with people from other backgrounds, and to push conspiracy theories about September 11 and the moon landing and how online retailers are shipping children around in furniture as part of a sex trafficking ring run by Hillary Clinton.
One of the funniest things about the Globe’s online unit was that the paper put us — a small team of about 10 people to start, most of them much younger than me — behind a glass wall at the far end of the newsroom’s second floor. It did this for a variety of reasons, including the fact that a magazine had moved out of that space and it was available, but when you saw it, it looked like the newspaper was afraid that everyone behind the wall was infectious somehow, and had to be contained or harmful toxins would leak out — and perhaps we were infectious in a way, because eventually the online staff effectively took over the newspaper from the inside out, like a virus. Cordyceps! But at the time it was an inside joke: outside were the serious journalists, and inside was the Toy Department. I played the whole thing up by buying everyone huge Nerf guns, and we would periodically break out into pitched battles from behind our cubicles.
For me, it was a time to experiment — I wrote regular online columns about business and technology, companies like Research In Motion and Nortel Networks and Google, which I think made me the first online columnist for a major daily newspaper. Then when the Globe instituted a paywall and my readership fell by about 90 percent, I started a “blog” because I had seen people like Dave Winer and Jason Kottke doing them and it looked cool — and also blogs weren’t behind the paywall 🙂 I turned my personal website into a blog as well, for the kind of content the Globe wasn’t interested in, and at one point I tried to get the paper to set me up with a team to do what Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg had done with All Things Digital, which was originally owned at least in part by the Wall Street Journal. But that’s not how the Globe did things, and I didn’t have the kind of clout that Mossberg had at the time. I eventually left and joined a blog network based in San Francisco, and had a great time until it ran out of money and shut down 🙂
Ed has mentioned some or all of the folks who were with globeandmail.com either at the launch or in the years that followed, until we took over the paper from the inside. People like Angus Frame, who took over from Ed and is now president of Torstar Corp.; Brodie Fenlon, editor-in-chief of CBC News; Kenny Yum, who ran HuffPost Canada and AOL Canada and is now also a senior executive at the CBC; Roma Luciw, who runs the personal finance section at the Globe; Richard Bloom, who was at Rogers and Bloomberg and is now at Canadian Press; Melanie Coulson, who was hire number one and is a content strategist for a medical firm; Stephen Wicary, who is now Bloomberg’s senior editor for Latin America; Jeff Gray, who writes about Queen’s Park for the Globe; Allison Dunfield, who handles media for Child and Family Services in Manitoba; Terry Weber, who continued writing for the Globe until he retired last year; Sasha Nagy, who was a senior editor at HuffPost and now runs his own consulting company; Peter Briant, a great senior editor; and Jim Sheppard, who helped run the Washington Post’s website before we poached him.
All in all, it was a great ride, and I am thankful to Ed for hiring me, and to the Globe’s former publisher, Philip Crawley, for letting him, and to Angus for letting me start a blog (“You go ahead, and I will pretend that we didn’t have this conversation,” he told me at the time) and everyone else who worked for the online division. It seems like a lifetime ago now, but I remember it like it was yesterday.
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