TGcom

» see tgcom.mediaset.it as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

A television company builds a news website. Ten years later the name is taken off the website and put onto a television channel. TGcom ran the usual direction of travel backwards, and it is the reason this grave is stranger than the shutdown notice makes it look.

Mediaset launched it on 8 March 2001 with Enrico Mentana as its first director, a man who had been running TG5 since 1992 and was as close to a household name as Italian television news had. Emilio Carelli took over after about a year. From 16 June 2003 until the final evening it was Paolo Liguori's. There was never a print edition and there was never going to be one, which in 2001 was still a thing worth stating.

It ended at half past eight in the evening on 28 November 2011, the hour TGcom24 went on air as an all-news channel and the website moved to tgcom24.mediaset.it. Nothing was destroyed and no archive was pulled. The name was simply reassigned to a bigger object, which counts, because a masthead that stops being anyone's masthead has stopped.

I have never read TGcom, and the Italian layer of the web is one I only visit on purpose. What I recognize is the shape. The same decade in Turkey produced the same object: a television newsroom puts up a site, and within a few years the site is the half of the operation more people actually touch. NTVMSNBC was the local version of that arrangement. The direction was identical everywhere, a channel's name gradually coming to mean the website, which is what makes it worth noticing that in Italy it eventually went the other way.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ bulletins with a website's name on them ~

The part that makes TGcom more than a portal is that it was a newsroom with an on-air schedule. Hourly bulletins under the TGcom name ran across four Mediaset channels, and it fed SMS and MMS alerts to subscribers in the years when a text message was a legitimate news product. There was a sister operation, TGfin, built on Radiocor's economic bulletins, and a film segment on Iris.

So the brand was already amphibious a decade before the rebrand. Italian viewers who had never opened the website still knew the word, because it was on screen every hour. That is an unusual asset for a web masthead to hold and it is exactly the asset that made the 2011 decision straightforward. You do not have to teach anybody a new name if you promote one they have been hearing for ten years.

~ half past eight ~

Very few websites get an hour of death. The record says 20:30 on 28 November 2011, because the ending was scheduled against a broadcast launch rather than against a server being switched off, and broadcast schedules are written to the minute.

Everything else about the transition was undramatic. The 2010 merge of the newsroom into NewsMediaset had already put the machinery in place. Liguori's eight-year run as director ends on the same date, which tells you the shutdown was an organizational event with a website attached rather than the other way around.

~ what the rebrand admitted ~

Renaming a ten-year-old news site after a brand new television channel is an admission about where the authority sits. In 2001 the website borrowed credibility from the broadcaster. By 2011 Mediaset had a website with a decade of recognition and decided the correct move was still to hand its name to a channel and let the site inherit the channel's version of it.

It worked, which is the uncomfortable part. TGcom24 is still on air and tgcom24.mediaset.it is still one of the more-read news sites in Italy, so the merge preserved everything except the original word. Most graves here are about something that stopped working. This one is about a name that was worth more attached to a transmitter than to a domain, at a point in history when everyone was fairly sure the opposite had become true.

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