The Newsday.com website grew out of an earlier, subscription-based incarnation. In the fall of 1990, responding to concerns that the telecom industry was starting to dabble in information-delivery technology and thus threatened to cut into the paper’s advertising revenue, Newsday Editor-in-Chief Tony Marro formed a task force to examine how to deal with the impending competition for ad dollars. The team, made up of Newsday editorial and business staff, reported back in 1992 with a recommendation that the newspaper adopt electronic publishing. The Times Mirror Company, which was simultaneously exploring ways to get its other publications like the Los Angeles Times and the Hartford Courant involved in the nascent Web, provided the financial and institutional support that led to the launch in late 1993 of Newsday Direct. [1]

Newsday Direct was a subscription-based model and was soon superseded by the open-source Web. In January 1996, Newsday.com went live with a basic HTML interface. The site, one of the first newspaper websites in the country, consisted of about three articles per news department and was updated once a day, at midnight. There was no video, no audio, and only minimal graphics. [2] It was staffed by half a dozen people under the leadership of the site’s editor and general manager, Peter Bengelsdorf. [3] Newsday ’s classified advertisers in the print edition were given the option of displaying their ads on Newsday.com for an additional fee, which provided enough revenue to keep the Web operation largely “in the black,” according to Howard Schneider, then-managing editor of Newsday . [4]

Six months after the launch of Newsday.com, TWA Flight 800 left New York’s John F. Kennedy Airport and exploded in mid-air, crashing off the coast of Long Island on July 16, 1996. It was Newsday ’s turf and the new website performed admirably, drawing a marked increase in traffic, much of which continued to visit the website even after the news event was over. [5] One of the site’s earliest and most popular features was an Associated Press wire feed (interestingly, the AP did not yet have a website). Newsday.com cemented its reputation as a place for wire news in 1997 when the President Bill Clinton/Monica Lewinsky scandal broke, and the later famous Drudge Report linked back to Newsday.com’s wire feed. [6] Traffic continued to grow exponentially and, over the course of the first 18 months of the site’s operation, the number of Newsday.com daily visitors tripled.

Newsday.com: Long Island and Queens . Newsday.com’s staff was based at the main Newsday headquarters in Melville, Long Island. By 2001, there were about three dozen people working on the site, including advertising and design specialists. Newsday.com also had a page dedicated to New York City, NewYorkNewsday.com , which covered news from Manhattan and the Outer Boroughs. That page had its own staff, who were based in the Queens Bureau of Newsday , in Kew Gardens. In 2001, the four Queens Web writers and editors sat in the same newsroom as the print staffers.

Tensions flare. Newsday.com’s innovative use of newswires, growing online readership, and financial solvency placed it squarely at the forefront of the development of Internet news. Despite its trailblazing innovations, however, Newsday.com faced stiff resistance from the print reporters in the newsroom. Reporters and editors had trouble seeing the importance of the Internet and why it was pertinent to their work. They were likewise wary of sharing scoops with the Web staff and breaking news online, fearing that it would give away their stories to the competition or that the Web staff would distort the story beyond the reporter’s control. [7]

Tellingly, the half dozen Web editorial staffers based at Newsday ’s Long Island headquarters sat scattered among the print editorial staff before, in 1998, being shipped off to a separate building altogether. (The two newsrooms were later integrated.) “We didn’t go to news meetings and they didn’t tell us what was going on,” recalls Newsday.com’s executive producer Jonathan McCarthy . “And then we moved to a separate building… and we spent the next few years walking over [to headquarters] for every meeting.” [8]

Newsday’s executive leadership, however, says it tried to integrate the website into the paper’s daily operations. “If we were supposed to be successful from an editorial point of view, then we were going to have to mobilize and energize all of the content resources we had,” says Schneider. “To replicate a separate group of people to go out and report the news made no sense. A) We were already doing it; b) we didn’t want a two-tiered system of world-class journalists in the newsroom and… baby reporters on the Web with no experience.” [9]

But integrating Newsday.com into the newsroom proved difficult. Unlike the Web staff, much of the newsroom was unionized, making the separation legally necessary. [10] Newsday ’s executive management saw the website as ancillary to the paper, a way of attracting additional print subscriptions. Mutual resentments began to grow. Newsday print staffers resented the increased workload from contributing copy to the website; Newsday.com employees began to feel like “second-class citizens,” and suspected that the print staff was purposely sabotaging their efforts to move the website ahead by shirking requests to file copy for the Web. [11]

Sharing scoops and exclusives with Newsday.com proved a major point of contention, especially as Web updates became more frequent and as traffic continued to double annually. [12] This put more pressure on the Web team to build on their successes, and on reporters to break more news online. Some print reporters, however, found the idea unpalatable and refused to file for Newsday.com, while some editors looked the other way. “I think our editors were smart enough not to make it an official thing,” says police reporter Melanie Lefkowitz , explaining that, though editors tried to cooperate, many “just kind of hoped that [reporters] wouldn’t do it again. You know a big tactic [for reporters] was, say yes, and then just don’t do it, which was probably a wiser tactic than refusing.”

This frustrated the Web staff, who had their own deadlines to make. “At one point, the only way that I could get some things done was to go to the editor and say, ‘Look, this is your job. You have to enforce it because I can’t do it.’ I physically couldn’t do it,” recalls Amanda Barrett, the Internet news manager for NewYorkNewsday.com. [13] Diane Goldie, the website’s deputy online editor and Barrett’s supervisor, became so frustrated with this state of affairs by 2001 that she decided to change her strategy: “I limited my begging to once a day in the meeting. And if I didn’t get it, we just did it ourselves.” [14]