The Daily Telegraph launched Britain’s first newspaper website, Telegraph.co.uk, then known as the Electronic Telegraph, 15 years ago this week. In the days before the launch the Channel Tunnel had opened to passengers, George W Bush was elected governor of Texas and Michael Schumacher won his first Formula One championship.
When it appeared for the first time, on November 15, 1994, the Electronic Telegraph led with news that the Conservative Government had blocked an “open inquiry on MPs’ cash”. On a grey background and with tiny thumbnail pictures, the Telegraph explained that some senior Conservatives had warned “that the row over standards in public life was damaging Parliament’s standing”. Some things never change, it seems.
Outside of the headlines, much has changed since then. It’s no exaggeration to say that the web has revolutionised the way we consume information. The music, film and videogame industries have all felt its effects but because of the ease with which text can be transferred online, even at slow data speeds, it was the news business that was first.
In 1994, the web was still in its infancy. Fewer than five years had passed since Tim Berners-Lee put in place the tools necessary for the global information network and by the end of 1994 it was estimated that there were around 10,000 websites. Today there are more than 100 billion.
Publishing wasn’t round-the-clock at first. Early on, the Electronic Telegraph was updated just once a day. Readers didn’t spend long online anyway, especially since most people paid by the minute for their internet access. When they did go online, people were often at a loss for places to go so the Electronic Telegraph provided related links on its stories in an attempt to show people the wider web.
By the time I joined the Electronic Telegraph in 1998, it was already becoming more of a rolling news site and we began experimenting with web-only content, picture galleries and video. The small team was hidden away, separated from the print journalists and on a different floor of the tower at Canary Wharf.
These days the web and print divide no longer exists. Telegraph journalists write for all our publications and the front page of the website is projected above us on one wall of our vast open plan newsroom in Victoria.
The days of the dotcom boom seem a long time ago. But as the public reconnected with old schoolmates on Friends Reunited, bought books from Amazon and citybreaks from Lastminute, key changes to the way we consume news were happening away from the mainstream.
From the beginning, the web was a self-publishing medium. As regularly-updated websites began to evolve into blogs, these new bloggers borrowed from bulletin boards to add comment boxes, allowing readers to discuss what they’d read. To make it easier for readers to follow their updates, bloggers took advantage of Really Simple Syndication (RSS). Readers could subscribe to RSS feeds, instead of checking the website every day.
It was exciting to watch as those developments made their way onto newspaper websites. Now we were able to join the conversation with our readers and we began blogging too, connecting with readers more quickly and on a more personal level than we had in the past.
As we began to feed our stories out, readers started sharing them, first via email and later on Facebook or Twitter. Organisations such as Google aggregating stories on Google News, more and more people are coming to news stories via third parties.
Our readers can now follow the Telegraph in print, on their computers and on their mobile phones. But our audience is increasingly global and our stories now reaching millions of people who would not normally think of visiting our website or buying our newspaper.
This new economy of news raises many questions. Some, such as Rupert Murdoch, are abandoning entirely the idea of free newspaper websites. Some time next year, Murdoch’s sites will be available only to subscribers.
Whether their plans will work remains to be seen. The themes of the last 15 years have been speed and conversation. People want more information and they want it as quickly as possible. They want to talk about it too, and to share it. The pace of change always seems to be quickening. The next 15 years promise to be more exciting than the last.
