From ET to TD

Then I made my fatal mistake. I commissioned an article about the internet. It wasn't an easy sell. Back in the summer of 1994 very few people had even heard of the internet, and in the rather gentile world of the magazine, where they still kept a manual typewriter in the cupboard "just in case", it felt as if I was trying to explain Fermat's last theorem.

"Look," I said, in a massive outburst of inarticulate enthusiasm, "this internet thing will change everything - how we work, how we play, how we read, how we run business, how we educate our children, everything."

Word soon spread around the building that there was a mad bloke working on the 11th floor babbling on about things like email and how it would soon replace the Atex messaging system (well, you can't be right about everything) and how we would all soon find a use for that funny @ symbol on the keyboard that we had never used before.

And, sure enough, soon afterwards two men in white coats came to see me. Well, they weren't actually wearing white coats but they had clearly come to take me away. Unbeknown to everyone else in Canary Wharf, they informed me, The Telegraph had hatched a plot - codename ET - to take over the world and I had a chance to get in at the ground floor. It was an offer I couldn't refuse - especially as the editor of the magazine had taken to calling me "Techno Nanny".

One of these pioneering spirits was called Ben Rooney. He had the haunted look of a man who hadn't slept for a month - which turned out to be the case. He had been editing the prototype version of Electronic Telegraph for several weeks, on his own. "Ben needs help," said the second man - a remarkably youthful looking marketing director called Hugo Drayton, famous at that time for sporting a quiff from hell - "and you are clearly the help he needs."

Thus I was plunged into the embryonic world of digital newspapers.

You would not believe how Heath Robinson the original set-up was. Our servers were two tiny Spark 10 boxes conveniently placed as a footstool under the desk. A stray foot could put us offline for minutes at a time as someone struggled with the mass of wires to find the power cable and re-insert it. We worked in Atex and I was amazed, on my first night, to find Ben labouring away inserting raw html code into stories he had fetched from the news queues. As a consequence, we didn't publish much to start with (especially when I was working alone). Ben was amazing: nothing seemed to daunt him. He even tried to format the race cards - something I quickly abandoned in spite of the protests from the MD Jeremy Deeds - when I took over sole responsibility for sport.

Fortunately, Brian Goodyear from the technical department, who had previously blagged the Sparks from Sun, was equally adept at chatting up the Apple Centre in Waterloo and I soon moved over to working on a Mac. But without the generosity of those first two sponsors the project would never have got off the ground because we had no operating budget at all.

Our brief was simple: explore this new medium; evaluate the usefulness of establishing The Telegraph as an online brand; learn about the technology, and establish what the commercial possibilities might be. The last point, although the most alien for journalists, was clearly uppermost in the thoughts of the proprietor at the time. At my first (and only) face-to-face meeting with Conrad Black he turned to me after my presentation and said: "You're going to have to work very hard to convince me that something we give away free is something I should invest money in."

Fortunately, Hugo Drayton was convinced that, from a marketing perspective, Electronic Telegraph could play a significant role in helping change perceptions about the Telegraph brand which 10 years ago was still very much associated with stuffy gentlemen's clubs. By launching the UK's first national newspaper website, The Telegraph effectively catapulted itself from the nineteenth century to the cusp of the 21st in one leap. It was heady stuff.

Aside from all the marketing and technical guff, perhaps one of the most significant developments was that we began to redefine how journalists should think and operate in a multi-media digital environment. We had, in the dreadful parlance of the times, "to think outside the box".

We had to develop close working relationships with areas of the newspaper that our print counterparts rarely, if ever, came into contact with such as advertising, research, IT specialists, and marketing. We had to become less insular. We had to become salesmen because everywhere we went we had to explain what we were doing, why it was significant, and why we should be supported. We had to become ambassadors because every time anyone visited the building, they always wanted to see the website editors. Indeed, we had many foreign journalists who came to The Telegraph with the sole purpose of finding out how we set up our internet operation.

We also started to exploit the new medium in ways that seem blindingly obvious now, but back then seemed quite revolutionary. Hyperlinks, for example, we soon realized could be used not just to navigate around the site and to link articles together but to take readers to some of the many other new internet sites springing up. The first time we did just that was in June 1995 when Shell announced that it was going to dump the Brent Spar oil platform in the north-east Atlantic and Greenpeace mounted a furious campaign to stop them. We linked to both Shell and Greenpeace.

This caused great consternation at The Telegraph: why were we making it easy for users to leave our site? Wasn't this a mistake? Ben and I both felt, instinctively, that if we provided intelligent links to help readers discover more about a topic we were doing what the internet does best and offering something the newspaper couldn't. In addition, we both knew from our own constant surfing that internet users are promiscuous: unlike buying a paper where you choose one and stick with it, most surfers hop around in a totally eclectic way. We had to make ET as full of cool links as we could so that we could build an audience who would instinctively start their internet adventures from our home page.

Another great 'discovery' of those early days was that we had a global audience. During the course of 1995, The Sunday Telegraph's Washington correspondent Ambrose Evans-Pritchard embarked on a series of investigative pieces about Hilary and Bill Clinton and the Whitewater scandal. His articles published on ET became so popular in the US that eventually, in January 1997, the Clinton White House felt obliged to release a 331-page report which accused Evans-Pritchard of peddling "right-wing inventions". In the days before ET it would have been highly unlikely that anyone in the US would have been aware of Evans-Pritchard's work - and certainly not to the extent that the White House would be forced to issue such a lengthy rebuttal.

This quickly led us towards the idea of making fact files - essentially compilations of links around one subject. Ambrose immediately got his own, of course, but we also created a much more ambitious one which tried to summarise the history of the Holy Land, complete with maps and reports from The Telegraph's archive. We did the same with a history of the EU and persuaded scores of politicians, activists and industrialists - both pro and anti Europe - to write short articles.

We quickly realized that the speed with which our readers could interact with our site made entirely new forms of 'journalism' possible. One of our earliest attempts at this was an interactive novel. We asked Ruth Rendell to write the opening sequence of a 'new' novel and then invited readers to carry it on, day-by-day. Hundreds of Rendell fans from all over the world participated: in fact we had to employ two Ruth Rendell experts to sort through the email.

Not everything we tried was so successful. Carried away on the tide of interactivity we installed a web cam on the 14th floor of Canary Wharf, overlooking the emerging Millennium Dome (courtesy of a wonderfully eccentric fan of the website, Larry Honig). Users - they were no longer merely readers - could log on and tilt, swivel and zoom the camera to look at the Dome. Unfortunately, quite a few of them were more interested in turning the camera 180 degrees to look into the room where it was sited. I spent many a long night tussling with some anonymous user fighting to get control of the camera: me turning it towards the Dome, he or she turning it back again.

Need list of dates when awards etc won

Launch team: Ben Rooney, Derek Bishton, Janet Plascow, Brian Goodyear, Dave Ingram, Carlo Tartaglia and Fiona (Carter) Hevey.