10 years? It feels like a hundred!

As impressive as the technology could be, it also had its Icarus moments.

Video download in the dial-up age, for example, was narcolepsy-inducing.

Dean Wright, a senior producer in the early days and later the site's second editor-in-chief, recalls a video of a jet explosion that "looked more like a slide show than anything that had moving images.”

There also were aggravating “crashes” of the proprietary publishing system and heavy traffic continued to occasionally render the site unreachable.

MSNBC.com The site wasn't the only thing crashing on Election Night 1996. MSNBC.com media editor Jim Seida catches 40 winks as the returns roll in.

“In the 1996 elections, I believe the site crashed almost instantly,” Wright remembers. “We got better in 1998. … It lasted a little bit longer before going under.”

Other difficulties had a more human dimension.

One was the challenge of getting software designers, networking experts and journalists from print, television and radio to communicate.

“At Microsoft, we were very used to thinking about building a product that you’d work on for three years and then drop it and sell it to the world,” says Rowe. “The news people came in and were used to turning around a product every 24 hours or every few hours.”

New language evolves
In an attempt to bridge those two cultures, a strange new language evolved, one in which terms like “hot dog,” “fast prop” and “granularity” were interspersed with actual English words.

The meeting of the tribes also gave rise to strange new rituals. For a time, a large metal gong was struck each time the site was “published.” This practice lasted until an aggravated employee ripped it off the wall.

Another workflow regulator was a traffic light set up in the newsroom. It blinked green and red to tell editors when they could — and could not — use the publishing tool.

“Generally we were on a four-hour production cycle … a time lapse that at the time seemed outlandish to those of us who came from TV or radio,” says Reed Price, a former senior producer.

MSNBC.com Coq au vin: The MSNBC.com chicken drowns his sorrows after a particularly tough shift.

Possibly the oddest indicator was a rubber chicken used to signal who, among the editors seated at a long news desk, was actually producing the cover page, giving rise to an oft-repeated question, “Who’s got the chicken?”

Occasional “artistic differences” also led to some memorable shouting matches, the breaking of the reinforced newsroom door and one of the most caustic resignation letters ever written, a widely circulated e-mail that included the salutation, “You phony pissant.”

Some of the differences also may have been reflected in the product, which didn’t initially speak to users with a clear voice.

Critics initially unimpressed
Media critics of the time complained about the site’s “dreamy, indistinct look” and navigational difficulties. In January 1997, an American Journalism Review straw poll showed MSNBC.com running a distant 28th among “news-oriented Web sites.”

But a significant shift in the consumption of news was occurring, and as the Internet exploded in popularity, so did MSNBC.com. Three months later, Internet audience researcher PC Meter reported that MSNBC.com had risen to the no. 1 spot among general news sites. Since then, MSNBC.com has rarely relinquished the top spot among online TV news sites.

Journalistically, too, the site flourished, its work acknowledged with top awards from the National Press Club, the Online News Association, Editor and Publisher and the Radio-Television News Directors' Association, among others.

Looking back it seems there was an unending flow of major news: Terrorism, natural disaster, war, impeachment, one of the closest presidential elections in U.S. history, notorious legal cases and much more.

There were scoops as well, including the death of Deng Xiaoping, massive thefts of credit card and identity information, shortcomings of the Transportation Security Administration, not to mention the Scoop — Jeannette Walls' daily must-read gossip column.

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