As 'The Irish Times' celebrates 10 years on the Web, Deirdre Veldon and Conor Pope chart the highs and lows of the newspaper's first decade breaking news on the Internet.
Traffic to ireland.com, the Irish Times website, went through the roof within minutes of the outrage. The computers that dole out the site's pages struggled to cope as the number of people seeking any titbit about the catastrophic events so far away multiplied at an unprecedented rate.
Roy Keane was being sent home from the World Cup, and people everywhere wanted to find out why. So they came in their thousands to ireland.com, where news about the Saipan calamity was being dished up as fast it became available - and where the Tom Humphries interview that seemed to have sparked the row was innocently sitting. The fallout from the row saw some of ireland.com's busiest news days, with more than two million page impressions recorded in 48 hours.
The Irish Times on the Web, as ireland.com was first known, brought a new capacity to The Irish Times: to respond to news as it happened. It meant the paper could now compete with broadcast and other media in a world driven by "instant news", unfettered by space or exacting daily deadlines.
The delivery of breaking news on ireland.com over a decade has been one of the most important factors in its development into Ireland's largest news-driven website. The first IRA ceasefire, in August 1994, and its subsequent breakdown, in February 1996, were among the first stories to bring the website firmly into the world of breaking online news. At the time a handful of extra stories were added to the site the morning after the Friday-night bomb attack on Canary Wharf, in London.
News of the Omagh bombing, in 1998, appeared first on the site, before there was any indication that there had been casualties. The deaths of Diana, Princess of Wales and Dodi al-Fayed appeared within a short time of their car crash, in the early hours of a Sunday morning in August 1997.
News that an aircraft had crashed into the World Trade Centre appeared on ireland.com minutes after a call to the Irish Times newsdesk from its North America Editor, Conor O'Clery, who had watched the atrocity from his apartment. "Plane crashes into World Trade Centre" read the breaking-news headline as staff struggled to cope on the one hand with a baffling, fast-changing story and on the other with a huge surge in online traffic.
It was only when the second aircraft struck that what had happened began to become clear. The e-mails that started to pour in from witnesses were published within minutes, along with photographs and video streams of the attacks. In the 24 hours after the disaster ireland.com had a record number of hits: 1.5 million page impressions.
The events of September 11th illustrated the difficulty of keeping up with a developing story: how to keep the news "instant" but factual. In the early moments of events such as these almost anything seems credible, and many websites have fallen into the trap of publishing the first information that comes to hand, without checking it.
The allure of a huge spike in traffic undoubtedly causes many news sites to run with the the sketchiest information, as desk-bound readers turn to the Internet for the first news of a story.
On the upside, and as the Internet matures as a news medium, each site will need to prove its worth as a reliable source.
Sites that routinely deal in second-hand and unreliable news will find their audiences shrinking with each new event, and readers won't be slow to point out inadequacies to both the site's owners and other readers.
Interaction is the key factor in distinguishing a newspaper website's coverage of events from that of its print edition. The Web allows for a level of interactivity that many traditional journalists might find baffling, annoying or both. But it is central to the online world. If readers are irritated by a report, they waste no time e-mailing the site to let it know.
The news polls and discussion forums carried on ireland.com are another example of the unique nature of online publishing. Day in, day out, regular contributors log on, climb on their soapboxes and vent their spleen about the day's issues.
Everybody's views have the chance to be published, whether they are reasonable, well argued and to the point or long winded and nonsensical, as long as they observe a few basic rules. Ireland.com contributors regularly have slanging matches on any of a range of issues, in a sort of no-smoking dry pub for the diaspora.
It may be surprising to see people from so many countries reading ireland.com, but there has always been a keen interest from the Irish abroad.
Some of ireland.com's most popular coverage has focused on events such as the St Patrick's Day festivals that have transformed the way the country has celebrated March 17th since the mid-1990s.
Although mastering a new medium has been exciting and challenging, it hasn't always been a smooth ride.
Even today the Internet has its sceptics, who dismiss its usefulness and point to unprofessional websites as indicative of a wider malaise in the medium. The truth is that the Internet is about as neutral as a piece of paper, a television screen or any other medium. Characteristics attributed to the Web are more appropriately directed at individual sites, companies or publishers.
The huge push for businesses to finally start to make money from the enterprise has seen the nature of Internet publishing change too.
When ireland.com announced it was going to charge for some of its content in the wake of the global dotcom downturn, some readers were disappointed, particularly those based overseas, who felt a certain ownership of the site as a forum for Irish people scattered around the globe.
Many other companies were to follow suit, however, as acceptance grew of the need to pay for an Internet product. Now a healthy number of subscribers pay for content on ireland.com, creating a significant and steady source of revenue.
This should ensure that ireland.com can look forward to remaining the Irish Times's online presence, breaking the news stories of the future.
Deirdre Veldon is editor and Conor Pope deputy editor of ireland.com
[ www.ireland.comOpens in new window ]
How 'The Irish Times' launched on the Web
Time can play funny tricks. In the gold-rush days of the Internet it was common to hear that one Web year, like a dog year, was equal to seven normal ones, such was the pace of development in the online world. It must have been true, because The Irish Times on the Web, as ireland.com was first known, seems much more than a decade old.
The events that led to The Irish Times becoming one of the first newspapers to harness the potential of the nascent World Wide Web, in 1994, were somewhat fortuitous. Seamus Conaty, then managing director of the Irish Times subsidiary Itronics, and a man who had long championed the possibilities of electronic information, had persuaded the company that there was gold in them there digital hills. He had also managed to coax some State development funds, as his aim was to export Irish information.
Armed with the cash, Conaty led a small but game deputation of Maura Reilly, from the commercial side of the company, and me, from the editorial side, to the west coast of the US, to see what the cutting edge of digital information looked like.
Pretty uninspiring was the answer in the main. Although e-mail was rapidly gaining converts, the main online players were dedicated dial-up services such as America Online. There was no Web apart from a very basic network used by the scientific community.
Eventually, our crew pulled into San Jose, in California, to see what the then trail-blazing Mercury News was up to. The paper was the celebrated host of an AOL news service, but by the time we arrived it had grown tired of the service's limitations and was testing a new technology, the Mosaic browser, forerunner of Netscape and Internet Explorer.
If it wasn't a eureka moment it was pretty close. Impressed to giddiness, we flew home to Dublin and within weeks had formed a partnership with a Trinity College campus company to publish The Irish Times on the Web.
The response was remarkable, or so we thought. In those early days accesses to websites were counted in hits - that is, each request for information from your server, as distinct from each unique user. In a short time we had a dizzying number of daily hits.
It was misleading, as we soon discovered, but even this sobering clarification could not lessen the thrill of being in the vanguard of a publishing platform that would, the zealots said, supplant all existing media.
It hasn't. But the Web hasn't done that badly either. Looking at that grainy screen in San Jose all those years ago, who would then have believed that this technology would become the pervasive platform that delivered news, ideas, images and beliefs from India to Ireland and all parts in between?
-Joe Breen
Joe Breen was the first editor of The Irish Times on the Web and is now the Irish Times production and design editor
