To some of the older print journalists across the road – the ones paying attention, anyway, since most still didn’t have access to the internet in the newsroom – the digital operation was a distraction which would damage the reputation of the Guardian: stuff being thrown together at speed by so-called ‘web monkeys’ with no experience of real journalism. Noses were put out of joint by one of the Ray Street team visiting morning conference and uttering the phrase ‘dead-tree journalism’. To the older hands the ‘electronic operation’ didn’t have the authority or real depth of print.4
But ‘depth’ was relative. Within a short time the newcomers were posting (or linking to) verbatim chunks of the Hansard parliamentary record; or publishing Clinton’s entire State of the Union speech. This was journalism of record few broadsheet newspapers had attempted in years.
Ray Street was frontier living, an experimental sandbox (or, pejoratively – to the cynical older eyes in the main newspaper – ‘the sandpit’ or ‘playpen’). There were basic technological decisions to take – commonplace now, but not at all obvious then – such as making sure that every web page address, or URL, stayed the same. The aim was that everything should be permanent, addressable, discoverable. That meant it stayed where it was; that it could be linked to by other systems and was findable by search.
At the time everyone spoke the language of feeds: you fed your stuff to Yahoo or Drudge and, if you were lucky, they would like it and post a link. But the uniformity of URLs was even more essential when, within a couple of years, Google could find your journalism if it was in the right format. Suddenly a kind of consistency began to emerge about how everyone described their ‘content’ (as it was unavoidably becoming known) and made it available. Soon, the audience would be numbered in millions rather than thousands and even the sceptics began to wonder if there might, after all, be a business in it somewhere.
The death of Diana, Princess of Wales, in the early hours of Sunday 31 August 1997 taught them an early lesson about demand – with numerous Guardian readers ringing up all day to ask where the coverage was. It was a good question. I’d woken to the news at 4 a.m. and had roused the obituaries editor and deputy editor, realising we had nothing at all pre-prepared. I was completely focused on the next day’s paper. My aim was to get a seasoned pro – Charles Nevin, a feature writer, was my first choice – and give him all day and 4,500 words to play with.
The Ray Street team managed to get something up and running by mid-morning, much of it agency copy, but with additional newspaper pieces as they became available. They also opened a talkboard for people to comment. By lunchtime there were hundreds of comments. The readers were teaching us: big news couldn’t wait until the following breakfast time. If the Guardian didn’t provide it, people would just look elsewhere.
The Guardian Unlimited site was finally up and running in July 1998 with six sites, which would grow by another dozen over the following 18 months. Within two weeks around 100,000 readers had registered for access – about a quarter of the number buying the physical product. But digital managing editor Simon Waldman later decided to remove registration: ‘because it was actually killing the site, it was one of the things that was pulling us down, just the extra load. Once we did that, obviously, things started to rocket. The idea that we’d one day be bigger than the electronic Telegraph was a pretty fanciful idea in 1999.’
Ian Mayes, in his weekly column, in early 1999, did his best to explain to readers the nature of the dramatic changes under way.
‘There will be an increasing number of occasions when Guardian scoops appear first on our electronic pages and we shall all learn to brag about it,’ he announced, sounding not entirely convinced.5
By October 1999 Mayes was reporting to readers on progress: there were now more than half a million registered users. Nearly 60 people were by then working on the website, of whom about 20 were journalists.6 We briefly experimented with producing a 24-page tabloid to be printed on A3 paper for distribution to luxury hotels around the world.
There were still companies who thought print, however delivered, was the future.
*
This new world of interconnectivity was baffling and uncomfortable in equal measure. The New York correspondent of any British newspaper would feel safe in buying the New York Times; creatively rewriting and adding to it; and then filing a version of it back to London. Then the penny dropped that, in this new world, their editors back in London could also read the New York Times; indeed, they’d read it five hours ahead of you. Moreover, American readers of your website wouldn’t tolerate warmed-up NYT copy a day late. You either filed original material on the day or you were irrelevant.
We were woefully ignorant of how those of our readers who were now online were consuming the news. We did gradually come to understand that the new world was one of information promiscuity: readers who had been loyal to one newspaper all their lives could now browse and graze to their hearts’ content.
In the summer of 1997 the Guardian editorial executives had descended on a country-house hotel for an annual awayday. Katz had presented on our progress so far and showed the NYT website, which at the time had an Associated Press (AP) wire on the front page. Research showed, to general dismay, that the AP feed was the most-read thing on the website. We were just learning the new buzz phrase ‘commodity news’ – news available to everyone and therefore not distinctive and (in commercial terms) not valuable. Yet here was the NYT letting their readers have access to the firehose – the source material, used by all papers, out of which many of our correspondents used to fashion their own work.
A (print) news editor stared at the slide in horror. ‘They’ve put their wires on the internet? People can see the wires on the internet?’
It was our sausage-factory moment.
7
The Conversation
At the end of one millennium and the beginning of the next, the media world was divided between those who still shrugged and those who were panicking.
This thing had come from nowhere and now CEOs were demanding urgent primers on what the internet was and what could be done about it.
The big consultancy firms did good business flying around the world telling media companies how to get with the act. In January 1999 two McKinsey principals, John Hagel and Marc Singer, published a book about ‘the merging role of the Infomediary’. ‘The truth is that very few of today’s companies have what it takes to become an infomediary,’ they warned. ‘Most lack either the customer relationships that will be necessary to get started or the risk-taking culture that will be necessary to succeed.’1
They foresaw a rapid period of alliance between internet-based and more traditional businesses – a marriage of speed-driven decision making and deep pockets. Success in future would depend on a business’s ability to capture information about customers and use this for commercial purposes. In the two years from early 1998 to February 2000 the internet sector earned over 1,000 per cent returns on its public equity.2 By the end of 2000 those returns had completely disappeared, but for a while the world went a little bit mad.
Our problem was, if anything, the reverse. We were spending modest amounts on the website and – probably – going too slowly rather than too quickly. The current rate of spend was around £3.8 million on staff costs by 2000/1, rising to £5.6 million in 2002. The total expenditure over the first five years of digital experimentation was around £18 million. Ian Katz, having launched the original Guardian Unlimited website and assembled a team of brilliant mavericks, was needed back on the paper. For the next few years the web operation was in the hands of two formidably talented and visionary journalists, Simon Waldman and then Emily Bell.3
The business model was looking as though it would involve a combination of recruitment revenue; business-to-business advertising and sponsorship; the licensing or syndication of content;