10 years? It feels like a hundred!

Mike Brunker Projects editor • Profile • E-mail

REDMOND, Wash. - Ten years? It’s got to be 100.

Just as “dog years” are used to compare canine lifespans with those of humans, “Internet years” seem the proper yardstick for measuring the decade since MSNBC.com first fanned its peacock feathers and began its uncertain flight into cyberspace.

How else to explain what seems like a lifetime of change, innovation and major news since then?

As Merrill Brown, MSNBC.com’s first editor-in-chief, puts it:

“You think about the simplicity of blogging, where Arianna Huffington can sit and publish to the Web in 60 seconds, and the hoops we had to go through to publish, and it’s breathtaking how far it’s come.”

To fully appreciate the journey, travel back to late 1995, when executives at Microsoft and NBC agreed to create an online news service paired with a cable news channel, both to be known by the eye-chart acronym MSNBC.

The Dec. 14 announcement left just seven months to assemble a news organization that would marry television, technology, words, photos, audio and graphics in a unique way for a young medium.

As new faces arrived almost daily, management struggled to sort out how the site would be run. “We hadn’t even figured out some things as basic as whether we would staff 24-7," recalls Brown.

Then, three weeks before launch, the site's Web address was shut down for a full day when the domain registrar misplaced a $100 payment.

Launch day
Despite these complications, MSNBC.com made its official debut as scheduled on July 15, 1996 — though most of you will have to take our word for it since the site initially was largely unavailable.

Only four or five servers were dedicated to the site, and they were quickly overwhelmed by the opening day traffic, says Rich Lappenbusch, director of operations at the time. (Today, 127 servers keep the site running.)

Slide show   10 years in pictures Click to see images with impact from the past ten years. Some pictures may contain graphic content.

“The cable channel and the Internet site were supposed to launch simultaneously, but when the time came the site wasn’t universally available,” recalls Andy Beers, then executive producer for news. “… I picked up the phone and on the other end was (NBC President) Bob Wright shouting, ‘Why isn’t the Web site up?’… I handed the phone to Keith (Rowe, the director of technology) and said, ‘It’s for you.’”

Additional server power was quickly harnessed, and over the next few hours the rest of the world got its first peek at the newcomer aiming to challenge early online leader CNN.com.

Greeting viewers on that first day was a new poll showing President Bill Clinton widening his lead over Republican challenger Bob Dole — a lead-up to NBC Nightly News anchor Tom Brokaw’s live interview with Clinton scheduled that evening, which was to include questions submitted by MSNBC.com users.

Just two days later, breaking news put the site to the acid test when TWA Flight 800 crashed into the Atlantic Ocean.

‘We were frantic’
“We were frantic,” Brown recalls. “We did not know how to deal with a story of that scale. ... We didn’t know how to build maps so we were literally taking pictures of maps.”

"Our ability to publish quickly was still very limited," adds Beers. "You could write a story, but it would take 15 or 20 minutes before it would make it onto the site.”

Even so, the horrific story, and the Atlanta Olympic Games that quickly followed, demonstrated the potential of Internet news delivery and began a tradition that was to become a hallmark of the site: the use of large, powerful photos to tell stories.

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