Dayton Daily News, 1993-1999

I was hired as Library Director and for the first time was responsible for a departmental budget and a small staff of five people. The old clip filing system was unsophisticated compared to the Star/News, but by this point both papers were archiving the text of most recent stories electronically.

My managing editor, the late Max Jennings, made it part of my job to teach all reporters how to use the Internet, which at that time was primarily Usenet, along with a few awkward file transfer protocols such as Telnet and FTP. The most user-friendly interface had been, Gopher, a menu prompt system interface like a public library book database.

There really wasn't much useful content on the Internet, especially not compared to services such as Nexis and Dialog that we already used in the library. On those pay-per-use services, we could search the full texts of hundreds of thousands of professional news publications from all over the world. We could get medical journals and patent filings and doctoral dissertations. Through credit bureau services, we would do address history searches on anyone with a credit history, along with the names and records of probable relatives, past employers and neighbors.

In 1993, as I was teaching those classes, I became to learn about a new Internet protocol called HTML and a platform with the then-hyperbolic name of The World Wide Web. Instead of relying on menu selections, Web Site pages used hypertext links that could be any word on the page, which would appear as underlined blue text, that when clicked would to jump the user to a completely different page. And instead of having to download images to then view, users of Web Sites could see the image right there in the page inline with the text.

And most astonishingly, HTML was not some complex software language, but a simple set of a dozen tags that anyone could learn to use in an afternoon. I didn't care that there wasn't much content on The Web. I wanted to put it there.

I found that I could use a web browser to give reporters access to the library's text archive -- and also display the images associated with those stories. I also started building an encyclopedia of "fact files" in which I composed encyclopedia entries about local people and events that the newspaper had written about. I could like from a story to the encyclopedia file, and also cite the story as a source within the encyclopedia entry and link back to it.

All of this was only on the internal servers of DDN and not available to the public. The paper did create a website and began loading each day's onto it. I made a pitch to publisher and business manager to put something like my project on the public site. They were good guys and supportive, but I don't think they saw it as the most likely way for a newspaper to make money on the Internet. Sadly, they did not find such a way.