Mercury Center

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

~ the eulogy ~

mercury center sits in the part of internet history i can read about but cannot remember. it opened in may 1993 and the part that made it famous closed in july 1996, two years before i first heard a modem negotiate. what i can do is describe it from its own pages, which are still there.

it started as a memo. in 1990 robert ingle, then editor of the san jose mercury news, wrote to tony ridder at knight ridder about where the company should go in electronic media, four years after viewtron had failed and taken a lot of newspaper confidence with it. ingle's proposal was an online service built from the paper's own reporting, organized around communities of interest rather than around the printed page. it launched on america online on 10 may 1993, at keyword mercury, second onto the service after the chicago tribune's chicago online.

the mercury news was one of the first american dailies to have any online presence at all, and it was the first to put its full content and its breaking news out there. this matters more than it sounds. plenty of papers were experimenting with a headline feed or a classifieds database. putting the entire paper up, every day, before anybody had worked out how that was supposed to be paid for, was a different kind of decision.

to get on it, you needed the floppy. the paper mailed disks to subscribers, because in 1993 software arrived in an envelope. by early 1994 mercury center had signed up 5,100 people, which was under a fifth of aol's thirty thousand subscribers in the bay area and under two percent of the paper's 282,488 daily print readers. it was not a hit. in november 1993 they bolted on a telephone and fax hotline called news call, on the reasonable theory that most of their readers did not own a modem.

~ the dossier ~

~ what a newspaper on aol looked like ~

the free part was generous in a way nothing has been since. the whole print paper, supporting documents and audio clips alongside it, stock quotes, and roughly two hundred stories that had been written and edited and then cut from the paper for space. there was a forum where readers argued with each other and, more unusually, with the reporters.

the money was somewhere else entirely. the popular paid features were the back issues, searchable to 1985, and a clipping service called newshound that watched the wire for your keywords and mailed you what it found. business users paid for those. so the shape of it, in 1993, was a free newspaper subsidized by a search product, which took the rest of the industry about twenty years to rediscover and then get wrong.

in december 1994 the same newsroom started beta-testing a web version, running on a netscape server with netcom providing the connectivity. it went live on 20 january 1995 at $4.95 a month with a discount if you took the print edition. that site did two things the aol service could not: it reached anybody with a browser instead of anybody with an aol account, and it kept the advertising revenue instead of splitting it with aol. the aol service closed in july 1996. it had been outcompeted from inside the same building.

~ the name that outlived the service ~

the interesting part is what happened next, one month after the shutdown. in august 1996 gary webb's dark alliance series ran, alleging cia involvement in contra cocaine trafficking, and mercury center published the reporting and the supporting documents online at the same moment the paper hit doorsteps. within days more than 2,500 sites had linked to it and the section was pulling a hundred thousand page views a day above normal, for weeks. the paper's own executive editor eventually distanced himself from the series. putting the underlying documents up alongside the story is one of the earliest cases of a newspaper using the web to show its work at scale, and it happened under a brand whose original home had just been switched off.

the name hung on longer than the service. an archived front page from december 1996 still carries the masthead, mercury center in blue and red over the line news and information for the silicon valley community. the paywall came off in may 1998, after a year that had brought 1.2 million monthly visitors. captures on 1 october 2000 still say welcome to mercury center in the title bar. by 6 december 2000 the same page reads welcome to the mercury news on bayarea.com, and by september 2001 mercurycenter.com is a permanent redirect to somewhere else.

so there are two deaths on the certificate and this grave is dated to the first one, july 1996, because that is the one that ended a distinct product. the second is a rebrand, and rebrands are how newspaper chains grieve.

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