Nando Times

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

~ the goodbye ~

nando times existed to solve a problem that was already solved by the time i had a modem. in 1994 the associated press had no website. neither did reuters, nor most of the papers buying from them. a newspaper in raleigh with a spare wire feed and a brand new media division could therefore be, for a genuine window of a year or two, among the fastest places in the world to read american national news. by 1998 i was loading cnn.com from ankara over a 33.6k line, slowly, and the reason nando had ever mattered was gone.

the parent operation started in 1993, when frank daniels III, editor of the news and observer, hired a news librarian named george schlukbier to build a new media division. the name came out of the paper's own nickname, which contained an ampersand that the library staff pointed out would break in a database. what the team built first was not a website. it was a dial-up service, a graphical front end to the internet running on the major bbs and extended out to gopher and telnet, sold across the research triangle for around twenty dollars a month.

the web server arrived in 1994 and the nando times came with it. the model was not original reporting. it was a full-time desk of editors working through everything coming down the wire: they picked the stories and wrote fresh headlines, then sorted the result into national and world and business and sports pages. this was roughly a year before most of those wire services built anything of their own, and before anyone had settled whether an online edition was a separate product from a printed newspaper at all.

i cannot claim to have read it. what i can say is that the shape is familiar from the other end of the world: a local operation that reached the internet early and briefly outran organizations a hundred times its size, then got bought by one of them.

~ the chronicle ~

~ where the news actually came from ~

the news and observer bought feeds from the associated press, reuters, agence france-presse, the new york times, the wall street journal and several others, and nando's editors reprocessed nearly all of it. sometimes they combined two wires into a single story or rewrote a lead. what nando was unusually good at was the topic page, a single address carrying dozens of links on a developing story, which it built for the oklahoma city bombing in april 1995 and again for the death of the princess of wales two years later. those diana pages, several hundred headlines and pictures from 31 august through 26 september 1997, were still sitting on the server in march 2005, long after the stories they linked to had expired off it.

~ lord high protector ~

the internal culture is documented mostly through its job titles. frank daniels III went by LHP, for lord high protector. schlukbier was CBGL, chief bull goose looney. everyone else invented their own. the other thing on the record from that period is that while kevin mitnick was living in raleigh and hopping through isp machines, nando was one of the boxes he came through, and its technicians spent part of 1994 and 1995 trying and failing to locate him while staying in required contact with the fbi.

~ the dear readers page ~

mcclatchy bought the news and observer company in 1995. the dial-up business went to mindspring and the original reporting experiments were cut back, and nando was pointed at serving mcclatchy's own papers rather than the open web. by 2003 the site and its sports arm together were drawing around four hundred thousand visitors a month, which is not nothing and is also not a national news operation. christian hendricks, mcclatchy's vice president of interactive media, put it plainly that april: nando times just did not fit into the direction of the success they had built.

the pages came down on 27 may 2003, replaced by a dear readers note and a list of mcclatchy titles where the wire content had moved. the fifty four people on the desk kept their jobs and kept processing copy, which then fed the 24 hour news sections of other mcclatchy sites. the archive agrees with the date to within a week. the front page was still complete on 20 april 2003, carrying its columbia disaster and war with iraq special reports, and by 28 may the domain was answering with a redirect.

there are two dates you could put on this grave and this one takes the earlier. the nando brand outlived the pages by nearly two years, until mcclatchy retired it on 3 march 2005 in favor of mcclatchy interactive. that was a renaming. the thing that actually stopped happening stopped on 27 may 2003, when the desk stopped publishing to an address the public could type.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »