Web at 25

Can't remember using it in college. I graduated in 1991. Probably '92 or '93 when I had my own computer and would modem in via Prodigy and mostly use their message boards to talk about MacGyver. Yes, I was using the WWW for practical things from the beginning.

 

For me, it was 1995. I started searching stuff pre-Google and used Netscape.

Hard to believe it's been so much a part of my life for the past 19 years.

 

I remember the first mpg that I watched online - the Zapruder film. Played it several times. Still convinced of a shot from the front.

 

In '93, one of my professors was putting all of our assignments on email, and told each of us to get an account. We were all pissed because it meant we had to go to the computer labs to get the assignment, and we wondered why the hell he just didn't print out the sheets and hand them to us in class.

And in '94, I was on a library computer, and had been set up with a chat room. I talked to a couple of people in the room on the computer, then kept talking with this one person. Finally, I asked them where they were from, and they answered a country in South America (can't recall which one). That stunned me.

 

Now-wife made us get a computer in 1996; I was immediately hooked. There was a gossip site about newspapers called Newsmait that was even more brutal than Sportspages.com. People just being ripped to shreds on there, with trade mags speculating about libel.

 

Newsmait was awesome.
It was brutal, but it was great reading. Inside stuff from papers everywhere.

Wasn't it run by a Florida guy in the Melbourne area? Sad day when he announced that he was giving it up. Forget the reason, but I think it was either A) he didn't have time for it anymore, or B) it was getting too brutal every day.

 

I loved Newsmait. He gave it up partially for the reasons you listed, and also, I think he was getting some pressure from his bosses because they were getting heat from the other newspaper execs.

I still remember one poster kept calling his boss, Little Hitler.

 

A quick Google search turned up this:

Read all about it at News Mait Writers’ Cooperative, a Web site managed by Melbourne, Fla.-based Florida Today reporter Maurice Tamman and loaded with the dirt on newspapers across the country.

News Mait — “Mait” stands for “My Aim is True,” the title of a 1976 Elvis Costello album, Tamman’s favorite as a youth — is more than command central for curmudgeons. It also provides links to dozens of sites with listings for journalistic jobs, as well as a forum for writers to make their pitches for work and for newsmen to debate topics of interest to them. The latest addition to the site, just posted this week, is a salary survey of newspapers across the country.

But the section that draws the most attention is the one slugged “newspaper intelligence,” which provides anonymous insights from the newsroom. (Oh, the irony of journalists overly fond of anonymous sources being burned by their own creation!) “Part of looking for a job,” Tamman says in explaining the genesis of News Mait, “is deciding what kind of place you want to work at.” And what better way to learn than from the oft-disgruntled reporters who work at a given newspaper.

http://kdanielglover.wordpress.com/1998/10/08/the-scoop-on-newspaper-life/#more-353

 

And this:

The News Mait Intelligence site -- a seething miasma of bitter complaints about cheapskate publishers, gutless editors, and boneheaded fellow employees -- has risen to Web heaven. A gossipy gripe board of sometimes dubious accuracy about working conditions at several hundred newspapers across the country ("This Just In," News, May 15), the site was dismantled recently after its founder concluded that it was taking over his life.

"I couldn't continue to spend hours and hours going through this with a fine-toothed comb," says Maurice "Mo" Tamman, a 33-year-old expatriate Brit who's a reporter for Florida Today. The beginning of the end, he says, came in October, when the trade magazine Editor & Publisher did a cover story on his site. Suddenly, the number of messages he received doubled, to about 150 a week. Already unhappy with the over-the-top quality of many of the messages, Tamman tried revamping the entire intelligence section, only to have two weeks' worth of work wiped out when his computer crashed. "I must say, I was devastated," he understates.

http://home.comcast.net/~dkennedy56/phoenix_981211mait.html


By the way, that first graf reads as if it were written by Dan Jenkins.

 

This is a fun place -- http://archive.org/web/ -- to check out early pages from SportsJournalists.com.

 

November 30, 2001, is the earliest screen capture.

 

You ever go back to read your stuff that's at least 10 years old?

Just did that for a bunch of gamers and features and previews.

I can honestly say that the spirit of the writing was strong. Strong information, too. The style was over the top at times and makes me chuckle a bit, but I had a lot of fun. I read the stuff 10 years later and think how much tighter the stories could have been. I was a 1-man department, by and large, and had so much to cover. I wrote on the fly and banged out the pages. So little time for editing.