In the spring of 1993, I paid a visit to my older son, James, then a sophomore at Harvard College. He had always been a “techie” and was then majoring in computer science. James invited me to visit his computer science building which was located in the distant reaches of the Harvard campus, We went to his work station, and he called up the web site of the Library of Congress, which had on the computer screen a picture showing an exhibit then going on at the Library. I remarked to him that since the exhibit had pictures and text on a computer screen , why couldn’t The New York Times do the same. He told me that the paper would require more memory and other technical reasons why it would not be feasible right now.
When I returned home, I began subscribing to web services such as Delphi, Prodigy,Netscape, Compuserve and America Online. Since I was foreign editor, I could get wire service news reports from these early news providers. Of course, in those days to access the online services, you had to telephone a “provider” which then put you “online.” The services were excruciatingly slow in those days. America Online known to everyone as “AOL” distributed CDs which you could use to find the phone numbers you needed.
In 1994, as I recall, AOL asked the New York Times to be one of the news organizations on its site. It offered a considerable sum of money, as I recall, but Max Frankel, our editor, was opposed. The New York Times News Service, which distributed articles world wide over leased telegraph wires, however, jumped at the chance and so that launched the Times in the internet. Elliott Rebhun, Chris Fowler and a small team each day assembled articles to put on the AOL site. One got onto the site, of course, by telephoning a number supplied by AOL. I was still foreign editor at that time, and I volunteered to handle any questions that arose on the AOL forums regarding the NYT’s foreign coverage. There was a considerable amount of discussion whether the NYT was too anti-Israel or not in those days.
Joe Lelyveld had already announced my retirement as foreign editor in early 1995 with a kind of vague announcement that I would be working on internet relations. So for a few months I had a desk in the Times’ wire room, and really had not much to do. Meanwhile, Arthur Sulzberger Jr. who was the publisher, had taken the advice of McKinsey consultants and decided to launch the Times’ web site. McKinsey had said it was important to protect the NYTimes’ real estate advertising since there already were sites popping up advertising real estate.
Joe, probably aware of my disappointment at giving up the foreign editorship was overwhelmingly kind in his announcement. He said that I had “the longest run that anyone has had in the top foreign desk positions in the last 30 years.”
“As we all know, it’s not just longevity he has to his credit, for his time as foreign editor spanned the greatest run of foreign news since World Wart II—huge transforming events like the fall of Communism, the breakup of the Soviet Union, the end of the cold war, the flaring of the Gulf War, majority rule in South Africa, Arafat greeting Rabin and the return of murderous ethnicconflict in Western Europe.”
There were three Times people already at work on developing a site: Kevin McKenna, who had been my assistant on the foreign desk at one time, Bill Stockton from the business side, and Steve Luciani, a techie. They hired Ron Louie, a designer, to help design the new site. Later in 1995, Martin Nisenholtz, an academic who was interested in the internet, was hired to be president of the new company which would be an off-shoot of the newspaper. We rented space in the Hippodrome Building which is at the corner of Sixth Avenue and 44th street. The Times then was still located at 229 West 43d street.
As I recall, our first hire was Naka Nathaniel, who had been an intern in the graphics department of the newspaper. Another early hire was Elizabeth Osder, who had been working for Knight newspapers, and who had put up an early web site for the Cleveland Plain Dealer in connection with the opening of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. She ran the forums debating the top five songs. We took note of this and Kevin McKenna invited her to New York for an interview, She was hired as Content Development Editor, in charge of material not taken from the NYT. I hired Jean-Claude Bouis, a senior writer from the Associated Press, to write our “breaking news” column. It was to appear twice daily, at noon and at 5 p.m. At that time, I have to confess that we were most interested in making sure the New York Times content was published on our web site. We were not yet that interested in covering breaking news during the day.
I hired Meredith Artley, a recent University of Missouri journalism school graduate, soon after we launched the site in early 1996. I hired her, Meredith asserted when I spoke to her recently, “because I had an email address and was willing to work late hours. I told her later, “It was an amazing group of people we hired. Anybody who knew anything about the Web we hired.” There were mistakes, of course. I hired a young woman to be our culture editor, but it turned out that she really did not know much at all about the New York scene. I had to let her go.
I would like to add that in 1998, Naka Nathaniel and Meredith Artley got married, the first marriage of people from the site.
I used to attend the regular front page meetings at the newspaper, and after I got back to our office, I would hold a meeting with the producers of each section and go over with them what the paper was featuring,, etc. But I am a bit ahead of myself.
In October of 1995, Pope John Paul II arrived in New York, and we decided to have a test run on the Sunday of that visit on our web site. Ron Louie designed the home page with the Pope’s picture in the center and a news headline on the top right side, and a link to cybertimes, our own special section, underneath it.. The web site came out okay and we were all encouraged. That basic design: a home page with a picture in the center and a few headlines on either side, lasted for several years.
The format of our web site was troubling because it was set up in a way to replicate the contents of the print newspaper, with only Bouis’ updates. We soon found this was inadequate. In 1998, with the assistance of IBM, we altered the home page to look more like it looks today, with many headlines on the page to be clicked. A major problem in the first years was the reluctance of the newspaper staff to treat the web site as an equal partner. Once I visited the Washington bureau, where I had worked for years as a reporter, and had lunch with the staff. At one point, I said that they should imagine a shooting in the Senate around 10 a.m. The web site could use a wire story initially, but when the staff has a piece we should use that instead. At one point, a reporter asked, “What if I get a tip from the FBI on who did it? I should hold it for the paper, right?” I answered “No. You should give it to us directly.” But in those first years, the paper did not treat the web site as an equal. Finally, in 2008, after I had left the paper, the paper broke the story of Gov. Elliott Spitzer’s use of prostitutes on the web site, and that ended the reluctance of the paper to give the web site exclusives.
Now, of course, the Times’ web site is an integral part of the overall operation. Web editors sit in the same newsroom in the new Times skyscraper on 41st street,
But in 2000, the web site was still isolated from the paper. In fact the management of the corporation intended for the web site to pay for itself with a stock offering. But the stock market crash of 2000 put an end to those plans. In 2002, with Howell Raines now the executive editor, I was told by Arthur Sulzberger that I should take a buyout from the paper, in effect, a forced retirement. I did so reluctantly, and moved a few months later to the Council on Foreign Relations’ web site where I conducted over 1,000 interviews with experts in the field until I left in 2015 to work on my memoirs.
