nzherald.co.nz has turned 10. To celebrate, we asked some of the staff who have worked on the site during the past decade to contribute their memories of how the site came to be as it is today.
KEY POINTS:
Gavin Ellis, former Editor-in-Chief of the New Zealand Herald, who led the project to launch nzherald.co.nz
What were the highlights of the early days?
The first highlight was securing the URL. I had been a bulletin board user in the formative days of networking, using clunky
modems that were as fast as spaghetti junction at rush hour. I became aware, very early on in the development of the internet in New Zealand, that there was considerable value in the web address. I had been working with a member of the herald's production and IT staff, Kerry Summers, who was enthusiastic about web development and arranged for him to secure the www.nzherald.co.nz URL.
The second highlight was when we started to create a news website using Herald content. I think we saw ourselves as pioneers.
Third highlight was when we started to run "live" news. This began with those reporters who were enthusiastic about the web. Gradually the idea grew that Herald journalists would be freed from advanced deadlines -what I called the "tyranny of the presses" - by using the web and filing for the Herald website before writing a story for the newspaper became commonplace.
The final highlight was the night of Sept 11 2001 (or the early hours of the following morning to be exact): the only person in the newsroom was a young woman loading Herald content, Megan Bedford. She had CNN running on a TV monitor and saw the attack on the World Trade Centre beginning to unfold. She set about recalling all the staff to the newsroom and the Herald ran five editions - including perhaps its first-ever noon edition - on the attacks. The Herald website swung into action and did a superb job, so much so that major international sites that became overloaded referred people to the Herald website for ongoing coverage.
Did you have a vision for nzherald.co.nz?
I had been involved in a number of initiatives in the company that involved electronic technology and had a personal interest in computer development that began when computers had 48kb of memory. I saw the internet in the 1990s as highly significant. It offered an opportunity for newspapers to augment their paper-based publications with something that was much more immediate but which (at the time) involved the same form of communication - the written word.
I envisaged an integrated newsroom where journalists worked in both media and a set-up where Herald readers had the ability to monitor a trusted news site while still having the print publication to pore over and absorb. I wanted the website also to augment the printed publication by providing a repository for archive and original source material that could not be accommodated within the finite physical limits of a newspaper.
Cliff Mail, hired in 2000 as nzherald.co.nz StockWatch manager, for its live stock updates, and now Head of Analytics for APN Online.
Has nzherald.co.nz delivered what people thought it would ten years ago?
The rapidly developing nature of the internet meant that it was difficult to set realistic traffic goals as things were moving so quickly. I think any media company would be very happy with the readership numbers we have seen. Generally, our expectations for traffic for the year ahead have always been exceeded.
The big issue for the wider company was to allow the site to grow without seeing traditional newspaper readership unduly affected. The balance was that online could cover breaking news in a more timely way than the printed edition and was not limited by space and could compliment the print edition by carrying multimedia. Getting advertising dollars spent online has been a slow process requiring a lot of hard work from an often small but dedicated team.
Neil Sanderson, nzherald.co.nz's first Editor.
How did the website start out?
In 2000, the Herald website was called "The Herald Online". It offered a sampling of the content from each day's print edition, augmented by
reader forums (where readers could start, or contribute to, discussions on any topic). We also had a classified advertising site called netclassifieds.co.nz.
Because the process for extracting stories from the newspaper's publishing system was very cumbersome and labour-intensive, we carried no more than a couple dozen stories each day. The few photos that we published were postage-stamp size, so as not to slow down the delivery of our web pages over dial-up connections.
In early 2000, I was hired to be the first editor of nzherald.co.nz, and there were two major things that I set out to change. The first was to improve the process of getting content onto the website, so that we could publish more stories. Our online editorial team developed smoother and simpler workflows, we began using more photos, and we integrated with the print edition's new publishing software which made it easier to copy stories onto the website.
The second was to untether the website from the print edition's publishing cycle. In 2001, our small team of online editors began posting breaking news.
The goal was to encourage readers to come back to the site several times a day, so I set an ambitious target of posting a new story every 10 minutes between 7am and 5pm, Monday to Friday. I think some of the editors thought it was way too ambitious, but they pitched in with enthusiasm, and the 10-minute updates were soon "standard practice" and something that helped distinguish the Herald site from its competitors.
What was the biggest challenge?
The biggest challenge we faced was probably the dot-com crash of late 2000. Some of our web staff lost their jobs, but the Herald remained committed to online publishing. Our small editorial team was spared the job cuts and slowly started to grow again.
Matthew Harman, former general manager of APN Online.
How has the website grown?
Because it was an early mover in the NZ online space, nzherald.co.nz managed to achieve early and sustained traction. Since launch, its always been one of the top couple of news websites in NZ, but in absolute visitors and page impressions the site has grown enormously. As more people have come online, internet connectivity has improved and the Herald has continued to invest in creating and aggregating new content and enhancing its user interface.
The slightly more abstract answer would be that in the beginning, the website primarily shovelled content online that was created for print. In 2009 it has grown to be 'its own person'. While the New Zealand Herald and nzherald.co.nz brands are still very much intertwined and co-dependent, the website is developing more of its own personality and the content available in the different mediums is slowly diverging, as the site focuses more attention on creating original web-only material.