This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2015, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.
We passed a milestone last week in The Salt Lake Tribune newsroom. Our website turned 20 years old. One more anniversary and it will be legal.
When we threw the sltrib.com switch on Nov. 26, 1995, we were among the first newspapers in the country to launch a website. The early days were pretty rudimentary: Three stories, one photograph, links to three more stories and 11 icon buttons to take visitors to various sections such as Utah and world news, sports and business.
Primitive, yes. But it was a game changer that opened new possibilities for innovation and audience engagement. It was the future.
Tribune reporter Tony Semerad was part of the initial online staff of three and recalls the sense of discovery.
"There was a distinct feeling we were inventing a new model for news delivery, without much to go on," he says. "We could literally have an idea and have it live on the site within hours."
With the potential to edit content already published, Semerad recalls, "we learned early on that we had to treat mistakes differently." Many of our processes had to be re-evaluated and, often, reinvented.
Perhaps the most powerful early epiphany was the feedback loop the Internet creates. The online team knew what people were reading — and what they weren't. Sharing that with the print journalists creating the content was to prove a challenge, both in our newsroom and newsrooms everywhere. We still argue how much influence traffic numbers should wield. We now have a much clearer vision of what resonates with readers, but that is only one factor to consider in deciding stories, photos and other content to pursue.
Our former digital director Kim McDaniel realized the incredible power of real time online audience engagement March 12, 2003, the day Elizabeth Smart was found.
"We were still pre-social media and before streaming video was truly viable," says McDaniel, now communications manager for Utah programs at Best Friends Animal Society. "So I sat on our live chat page and typed a live transcript of the press conference, trying to answer reader questions on the fly. What a rush!"
That day, our coverage received 2 million views, an unheard of number back then.
Former online editor Manny Mellor remembers sltrib.com hitting several milestones. The day we hit 10,000 page views "we threw a party." Nowadays, we routinely eclipse that number by a multiplier of 70 or 80.
Mellor also recalls the first day online readership surpassed the number of print readers. When he posted the numbers on a newsroom bulletin board, an editor told him he did the math wrong.
Mellor — who now works for Newscycle Solutions, one of the leading software providers to news organizations around the world, including The Tribune — says the big moment for him came during Salt Lake City's 2002 Winter Olympics.
"It was over those two weeks that we morphed from a social experiment into a 'real' news outlet. We were all working nearly 24/7, and there was an energy that was infectious. Traffic to the site went up by 700 percent overnight and it was using up all the bandwidth into the building."
It was definitely too much of a good thing. Our photographers couldn't file their images because of the bandwidth pressure. Mellor remembers literally unplugging sltrib.com servers and running them over to Internet provider XMission, which could handle the traffic.
Twenty years ago our lives as newspaper journalists changed. And so did the rest of the world. Twenty years hence, today likely will appear just as foreign. But the core of what we did then, and what we do now, will remain — serving readers with indispensable information, watchdog journalism and the Utah story.
Terry Orme is editor and publisher. Reach him at orme@sltrib.com. —
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