“Bakersfield.com was not really much for a couple of years,” admits Jenner. ^[2] The Californian ’s initial online offerings were experimental and not always successful. It solicited online advertisements from real estate agents and car dealers, but both groups doubted the medium could make them money and shunned the paper’s website. The Californian also tried a job website. “We had a button that said ‘post your resumes’ and well, people were sending us resumes. But we didn’t know what to do with them,” Jenner says. Another failed experiment was BakersfieldBabies.com, a website intended for proud parents to share news about their kids. “But people were freaked out,” Jenner says; anxious parents feared everything from identity theft to child pornography.

However, Jenner—with Executive Editor Beene’s active encouragement—persevered. His mandate was large: turn Bakersfield.com into a gateway for Internet activities including email, search engines, reader forums or shopping. His goal was to make the site “kind of the bulletin board of the community, but also this big, huge cash cow revenue stream,” he says. In 1997, when he was promoted to the position of vice president for new media, Jenner hired about 10 people for a New Media department.

But the newsroom continued to work on a traditional print-centric model. “We had a few people up in the newsroom who were a little geekier and more into [the Internet as] a tech, ‘isn’t this cool’ kind of thing,” Jenner says. For the most part, however, the New Media group and the newsroom remained separate. Any idea about integrating them more closely died in 2000 along with the bursting of the “dot.com bubble.”

Pull back. With the collapse of what had been a booming (and overly speculative) technology sector, the Californian in 2000 redefined its commitment to the website. “We pulled back and said, ‘Okay, we still believe in this, but not now. We can’t invest at the same level,’” recalls Jenner, whom Moorhouse had promoted to executive editor in 1999. “So we said, we’re going to back off.” The company drastically cut back the New Media group. ^[3]

There the website remained until 2004. That year, while preparing a report for the Californian ’s annual executive staff retreat, Jenner studied current traffic statistics for the paper’s website. “They were phenomenal. I mean phenomenal,” he says. “While we were sleeping, it had just kept growing.” With no deliberate effort on the paper’s part, the site was drawing viewers clamoring for more information. Jenner adds:

Here we were, knocking our heads against the wall trying to raise circulation [for the newspaper] or keep gross circulation the same. And while we were cracking our heads against the wall, and doing zero to the website, there was huge growth.

At that point, Bakersfield.com was still essentially an electronic version of the paper. “It was just one big shovel dump at night,” Jenner says of the website’s content. “There was no video, no community activity, no blogs.” The paper’s website wasn’t even user friendly. “We had this really cumbersome registration process where you had to basically give your DNA to get in. It was too much. Still, people would almost do that just to get in,” he says.

Listen to Jenner’s reaction to the surprising rise in online readership.
Length: 50 sec