APBnews.com

» see apbnews.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

In 2000 I was in high school in Turkey on a dial-up line, and American crime reporting was not something that reached me in any form. APBnews.com was a US product about US courts and US police departments, and even the audience it was built for has mostly stopped remembering it. It is worth writing down because it was one of the very few dot-com era newsrooms that did serious work before the money ran out.

It launched in August 1998 with three and a half million dollars of venture funding and a name lifted off police radio. The argument was that crime and criminal justice are among the most read subjects in any newspaper and nobody had built a proper web operation around them. A second round of twenty million dollars followed a year later, and the company spent it on people.

The staff list was not what you expect from a 1999 website. Reporters came over from the Washington Post and the Associated Press, and Sydney Schanberg, who won a Pulitzer at the New York Times for his reporting out of Cambodia, was on the masthead. At full size the newsroom ran to 140 people in Manhattan.

~ the dossier ~

~ the origin ~

The part that still holds up is the records work. APBnews.com went after federal judges' financial disclosure forms in the autumn of 1999, filed for copies, and said it would put them on the web where anybody could read them. A committee representing the country's sixteen hundred federal judges blocked the release, on the argument that publishing the forms online created a security risk which publishing them on paper somehow did not.

The site sued and added a First Amendment claim to the case. It won, and the judiciary released the forms in the spring of 2000. That is a real piece of press-freedom history belonging to a company almost nobody has heard of, and the public-records databases it was assembling alongside it, of prisons and police departments, were doing in 1999 what the transparency sites would spend the next decade catching up to.

~ the unraveling ~

None of it had a business under it. Crime news is read widely and sold cheaply, and the display advertising market of 1999 was never going to fund 140 salaries in New York. The company was raising against a story about audience rather than against revenue, which works exactly as long as the market believes the story.

In March 2000 the market stopped believing it. That is the month the Nasdaq turned and the month APBnews.com could not close the financing its budget already assumed. By June the company owed seven million dollars and had fifty thousand in the bank. That is not a cash-flow problem, it is an ending with a date attached to it.

~ the day it died ~

The layoffs took everyone. All 140 staff went in a single round in the summer of 2000, Schanberg included, and the company filed for Chapter 11. The site sat there in a frozen state while the lawyers worked through it, which is its own particular kind of grim: a crime desk with nobody at it and the last stories still on the front page.

The auction ran on 7 September 2000 at the US Bankruptcy Court in lower Manhattan. SafetyTips.com had offered 950 thousand dollars earlier in the process and cut the bid to 575 thousand when no other bidder appeared, and at that price it took the name, the site archive, the domain portfolio and the patents. Two years of the best-staffed crime newsroom on the internet went for 575 thousand dollars because there was nobody else in the room.

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