New Century Network

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

~ the goodbye ~

New Century Network died in March 1998, which is the year I first got online. It was never going to reach me, and the odd part is that it barely reached anyone in its own country either. Nine of the largest newspaper companies in America built a website together and then made sure their readers could not find it.

The consortium came together in April 1995, which for a newspaper company was early. The premise was sound enough on paper. Any single paper's website was small and local, unable to sell national advertising against its traffic. Pool a hundred-odd papers into one destination and you had a national audience, and a national audience was something advertisers already knew how to buy.

The product was called NewsWorks. It aggregated stories from every member paper into one site, and later tried to work as a search engine across all of them. Each of the founding companies put in a million dollars to start, and across three years the members spent somewhere around twenty-seven million between them.

What killed it was the same thing that built it. Small papers were afraid of being swallowed inside something they had no power over, and the large ones were afraid that if NewsWorks actually worked, readers would go there instead of to their own sites. So the members kept the links to it small and hidden on their own front pages. The venture was starved by its owners on purpose, and not one of them was wrong about their own interest.

~ the chronicle ~

~ who was in the room ~

The roster is worth writing down because it is the whole American newspaper business of 1995 in one line. Knight-Ridder, Tribune, Times Mirror, Advance Publications, Cox Enterprises, Gannett, Hearst and the Washington Post Company went in together, with the New York Times Company joining a month after the other eight. Between them they published more than a hundred papers.

NewsWorks was shut down in February 1998 and a third of the staff went with it. Two weeks later the board voted to close the company outright, and about forty people lost their jobs. The statement they put out is a masterpiece of saying nothing while admitting everything: they had been unable to agree on a business plan that would receive the support of enough partners to move forward. Harry Chandler of the Los Angeles Times put it more plainly to a reporter. Not enough members felt strongly enough to keep it going.

~ the search they walked away from ~

Buried in the wreckage is the part that reads worst in hindsight. Toward the end, NCN was trying to be a search engine across its members' archives, a way for the people who owned the writing to also own how it was found. That effort was abandoned along with everything else when the board voted in March 1998.

Google was incorporated that September, six months later. The newspaper industry spent the following twenty years watching search take the relationship with its readers and complaining about it, having had a consortium pointed at exactly that problem and closed it because nobody could agree on the terms. The domain tells you how it ended. Type newsworks.com today and you get a broker's holding page: this domain is being used and is therefore not available, but if you were willing to pay well above market you could try to contact the owner. Good luck, it says.

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