Every now and then over the years I’ve mentioned the pioneering effort in online journalism I was involved in briefly as managing editor from November 1996 to February 1997 in Kingston, Ontario. The Kingston Net-Times was an online-only newspaper going head-to-head with the Kingston Whig-Standard before even the Whig was online (which made competing online kind of easy for the brief time that lasted).
Everyone knows by now the fixed costs of online publications are a fraction that of bricks-and-mortar newspapers, some now with their high-end Goss 96pp Sunday 5000 presses, which weigh in as a total equipment package at about 1,371 tons, with the single heaviest piece of equipment weighing in at 43 tons. That’s bigger than the Goss press out back at the Thompson Citizen, which hasn’t printed a newspaper since January 2007 (but school kids invariably asked more questions about it on class visits to the newspaper than any other aspect of the operation during my seven or so years there).
But there is still a cost to producing an online paper, even if it is from your computer at your kitchen table, which was pretty close to how the Kingston Net-Times was cobbled together. By any measure it was pioneering but also under capitalized. So – and this is often how things go in the newspaper industry – while I was having great fun during an Ottawa CBC Radio Noon interview tweaking the nose of Goliath, in this case the Kingston Whig-Standard, where I had worked as a reporter and copy editor from 1993 through June 1996, when I left to work briefly as a copy editor at the Ottawa Sun, and making some sport of Conrad Black and Hollinger, the newspaper company he built with David Radler, I was also aware the publisher was having some, shall we say challenges, making payroll at the Kingston Net-Times. Ever the pragmatist or mercenary, take your pick, the CBC interview hadn’t aired more than a few weeks earlier when I decamped for a second stint at the Peterborough Examiner, which was not online then and producing old-fashioned ink-on-print newspapers. Oh. Did I mention the Peterborough Examiner was, of course, at that point a Hollinger paper? Actually, I believe by then it was our sister paper, The Intelligencer, down the road in Belleville, Ontario, that was printing the paper for us, and it was trucked back to Peterborough overnight. The Peterborough Examiner press, too, had been silenced by economics when I returned in April 1997, if memory serves me correctly, although I stand to be corrected on the date, as I’ve been at several papers over the last 20 years, where silenced presses still sit physically in the building as some sort of behemoth over-sized metal museum pieces.
I can almost tell you to the day in retrospect when I think the Internet “arrived.”
When I arrived at Queen’s University in Kingston as a history graduate student in September 1993, the main library was still Douglas Library on University Avenue, but across the street kitty-corner to it was a massive construction project where they were building the brand-new Stauffer Library on Union Street. This was the end of the brief five-year NDP Bob Rae era in Ontario and while the economy wasn’t strictly speaking in recession, it was far from booming, so projects of such scale in places like Kingston were rare.
I remember using an Internet station in the just opened Stauffer Library the next year on one of my first visits in October 1994. The Netscape Navigator browser had just been released that same month, but Queen’s was using the NCSA Mosaic browser, released in 1993, almost the first graphical web browser ever invented. The computer services and library folks at Queen’s got it from day one to their credit. They knew this was going to be so popular with students instantly, the work stations (and there weren’t many) were designed for standing only. How many places in a university library is their no seating? Not many. But they wanted to keep people moving because there would be lineups to use the stations.
I remember reading the San Jose Mercury News online because it was in Silicon Valley and one of the very first papers in North America online. The funny thing is, the San Jose Mercury News recognized its brief moment in history and for a few years anyway punched well above its weight, doing fine investigative work, both in print and online; a small regional paper no one had ever heard of before the early 1990s unless they lived in Southern California.
But in 1994, we all knew intuitively the world had changed with the Internet and graphical web browsers. I had sent my first e-mail from Trent University in Peterborough more than three years earlier in the spring of 1991 from the Thomas J. Bata Library on their “Ivory” server (someone in computer services seemingly had a sense of humour), and was also sitting down as I recall. That was neat, but this was on a whole other scale entirely.
That said, I’m a bit of a contrarian, and just as I was finishing up writing America’s symbolic ‘Cordon sanitaire?’: Ideas, aliens and the McCarran-Walter Act of 1952 in the age of Reagan for my master’s thesis in 20th century American history on the admission of nonimmigrants to the United States, emigration and immigration policy, and foreign relations in Latin America between 1981 and 1989, I decided I need a bit of a break from writing at odd hours in the always-chilly-even-in-summer math computer lab in the basement of Jeffery Hall, which has three floors underground and opened at Queen’s in 1969, housing the Department of Mathematics and Statistics, and is named after Ralph L. Jeffery, head of Mathematics and chair of graduate studies from 1943 to 1960.
So what did I do? Well, I made a few trips that summer to nearby Sandbanks Provincial Park in Prince Edward County, Ontario’s only island county (alas now long linked across the Bay of Quinte on Lake Ontario to the mainland at Belleville by a bridge) but I also took along Clifford Stoll’s just published Silicon Snake Oil: Second Thoughts on the Information Highway, where he discusses his ambivalence regarding the future of how the Internet will be used and suggests even then the promise of the Internet was vastly over-hyped by those with vested interests to do so. An American astronomer by trade, Stoll is best known for his pursuit of hacker Markus Hess, who broke into a computer at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in 1986, which led to Stoll’s 1989 book called The Cuckoo’s Egg: Tracking a Spy Through the Maze of Computer Espionage, which I have also read. But I must confess I have not even attempted to tackle his 1980 PhD dissertation from the University of Arizona titled Polarimetry of Jupiter at Large Phase Angles, which I gather looked at cloud models and “Jupiter’s solar flux deposition profile.” Whatever that might mean.
While Stoll was wildly wrong in Silicon Snake Oil in underestimating the future of e-commerce and online news publishing, 20 years later the book still stands the test of time, I think, as a general cautionary tale about over-hyping the Internet and getting too carried away in our virtual enthusiasms.
Which is why the following year in 1996, as the managing editor of the pioneering Kingston Net-Times, I was, as I recall, urging my readers to follow Stoll’s suggestion to log-off the old dial-up modem mainly back then from time-to-time to bake some chocolate chip cookies (at least that’s what my memory recalls him writing) and to take in a kid’s hockey game at the local arena (my idea).
The publisher, who in all fairness, gave me great editorial latitude was a bit less holistic in his considered view. In fact, he was, truth be told, incredulous. He used the old-fashioned telephone to call me, rather than send an e-mail, and asked, “Did you really suggest people log-off?” It is possible several expletives followed in the next sentence when I assured him I had indeed. Fortunately, our online (is that irony?) readers loved the column, albeit a novel idea to most of them, and sent us e-mails to say so.
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