Breaking News. Alan Rusbridger
with what we were taking in print – but then we were planning for a world in which print might itself be taking peanuts.
Advertising was actually healthy enough at this stage, but we had launched a stand-alone website, Workthing, designed to replace, and even grow, the classified print revenues. It was promoted as a ‘complete employment network’ aimed at younger junior or middle managers. Everything in recruitment was moving online: digital was quicker and more comprehensive: the internet had better reach and could save 80 to 90 per cent of costs. The market was going to be worth $7 billion by 2005, and we wanted a large chunk of it.
Consultants crawled all over the projections and estimated that by March 2005 we could be making anything between £8 and £30 million a year in profits – but only after sinking £30 million of losses to get it airborne. Sales in 2000/1 were, at £5 million, still modest – but the team had high hopes of building that to more than £60 million within a few years.
Reach before revenue.
We were in the green bubble all right. The newspaper division would go on losing money – but, as the other parts of the organisation were highly profitable, this level of investment felt manageable to the Scott Trust. Long term meant long term. We could be patient.
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Our investment on the main Guardian website was still modest – a drop in the water compared to frenzied activity over at News International. Around mid-1999, according to a semi-authorised book4 about Murdoch’s business at this point by Wendy Goldman Rohm, he was convinced by his sons that he was ‘missing the internet boat’ and, within nine months, had allocated more than $2 billion in resources to online projects. ‘The market was going wild, there was money to be made and he decided to jump on the bandwagon.’
While on honeymoon in Tuscany with his second wife, Wendi, he and some executives (evidently joining the honeymoon) planned a new UK internet division, to be called News Network, according to Rohm. This would be the digital arm of News International, the UK newspaper division which published the Times, Sunday Times, News of the World and Sun.
But the bubble in internet ventures was about to burst in the summer of 2000 and – less than a year after announcing he’d ‘got it’ – Murdoch ordered a retreat. According to Rohm, in a Los Angeles bar in July 2000 his top internet gurus were told there was to be no more spending on internet businesses. A few months later News Corp formally announced it was folding all its online businesses that had operated under News Digital Media back into their respective company divisions.5
Murdoch was not alone in struggling to make quick returns on digital investments. Nearly everything was failing. In September 2000 everyone was trying to create women’s portals with names like Handbag, iCircle, Beme and uk.women.com. They all petered out. Emap, a trade magazine company, splashed out £50 million, only to announce a wave of site closures as they failed to work. Pearson were scaling back after lavishing more than £100 million in investment on the FT (£30 million on marketing alone). Trinity Mirror decided £10 million a year was more appropriate than the £42 million pre-bubble rate of spend. Associated had launched Charlotte Street, a ‘women’s portal’ in October 1999 and then relaunched it a year later, concentrating on 29-to 40-year-olds. It lasted another year before being quietly put out of its misery.
Success in this new world was proving even more uncertain and expensive than anyone had imagined.
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What was a newspaper becoming? The old newspaper model could be sketched as a tablet of stone – something handed down from on high. Our talented Polish-born illustrator Andre Krauze once drew the old world of newspaper production as journalists throwing newspapers over a high wall at readers on the other side.
Newspapers encouraged letters from readers. Hundreds would arrive every day – a tiny number to be selected for publication by the letters editor. As with nearly everything in the old world, we were in control. Who gets a voice, who doesn’t? We chose.
But this new world in which we were now playing didn’t feel like a tablet of stone. It became fashionable to start using the term ‘a conversation’. It wasn’t really, but there was much more two-way traffic. An early idea was to set up talkboards where the readers could congregate virtually and chat. They are, of course, ubiquitous now but were then in their infancy: it took a while for us to get our heads around them. It began around 1999, with a version of what was then a football bulletin board, and grew rapidly.
We were – mostly – pleased to host them. They were very lightly moderated and the user interface was rudimentary. Occasionally the users would rebel if we changed something in a way not to their taste, and there would be periodic desertions: it was relatively easy for a number of disgruntled users to clone the site and take it elsewhere – an early reminder, if we needed one, that we were no longer in control.
Over time readers started their own threads on multiple issues a day – including media, film, books, international news. The best and worst of humanity was on display. At their most unpleasant they were scrappy, almost wild – with bullying, stalking, trolling and name-calling. Some of them were, in the words of one poster, ‘utterly batshit’. The Israel/Palestine discussions were good ones to steer clear of if looking for rational, calm discussion.
At their most obsessive they were a place where lonely pseudonymous souls would argue for days about the relative merits of tinned or dried chickpeas, or whether different flavoured crisps projected a range of sexual orientations. As one former contributor wrote: ‘They could give expert guidance on everything from the structure and formation of PCTs,6 to the best laptop to buy, via a debate about God and the true meaning of existence, interspersed with a spat about who would win in a fight, a caveman or an astronaut.’7
There was (to old newspaper eyes) a kind of anarchy in play, much to the despair of the occasional moderator who would vainly plead: ‘this is a board to discuss current affairs – there are countless chat sites on the web if you want to chat’. The moderators (or ‘mods’) would soon retire hurt. Yes, the Guardian had created this space, but it was, in the users’ eyes, ‘their’ space and they’d do what they liked with it. If they wanted to spend Christmas creating a Thread to Talk Like the King James Bible – where you had to write about boring everyday matters in the style of a sixteenth-century biblical scholar – that was their business. Rarely did any thread stay on topic for more than three posts.
And then there would be threads that endlessly warmed, sustained, amused, diverted, educated and enthralled. People met their partners there. Friendships were forged, relationships were incubated: several marriages and children followed. One couple live-posted the home birth of their baby. Another still remembers the support she received when receiving treatment for cancer. There was not one porn post.
One of the most popular shared activities was watching television in the virtual company of others. The talkboarders would chat away to each other throughout the first series of Big Brother – the C4 reality show, aired in 2000, which spied on ‘housemates’ marooned inside a custom-built home. There would always be a gaggle on hand to discuss anything David Attenborough was doing. One poster reflected later: ‘That couldn’t happen now as there isn’t a social media that really allows it (Twitter is too huge) and everyone is On Demand so not watching at the same time.’ We learned from the behaviour of the users. Live coverage of big television ‘events’ became a staple of later coverage on the main site.
The community of regular, active contributors was never huge – maybe only a few thousand. Over time their space became overtaken by larger experiments and the talkboards became a bit of a forgotten backwater, untended by moderators.8 Untended spaces tend to become unkempt, and some areas of the talkboards ended up almost feral.
But the users were, to some extent, pioneers: they formed their own basic grammar, or (what become known as) netiquette.