The BBC News website is (not quite) 10 years old
Posted by
Martin Stabe
on 30 October 2007 at 17:14
Tags: BBC
BBC News Online is ten years old this week. The anniversary comes at a tumultuous time for the site. BBC News Interactive, the department that runs the site, is due to disappear as part of the corporation’s restructuring.
The site is also preparing for some major commercial changes, as the BBC prepares to launch BBC.com, a commercially-funded web site for overseas users. According to a blog post by head of global news Richard Sambrook, an advertising-supported BBC.com is due to launch next month, to be followed by a subscription based site in the new year.
The BBC’s own potted history shows the staggering traffic growth of the site, which now registers more than 1 billion pageviews per month (yes, billion with a ‘b’). The BBC doesn’t regularly release regular monthly unique user figures, its most recent annual report put the traffic at 12 million unique users — per week.
One strange quirk in the story of the BBC News website’s anniversary is that nobody can quite recall the exact time of the launch, except that it was this week in 1997. Archivists and historians must already be fretting that so much human knowledge is now being published in an online form that is not necessarily as permanent as paper.
Two contemporaneous accounts — neither of which are online — put the launch date as 4 November, however.
A small item at the bottom of page 2 of Press Gazette on 31 October 1997 noted that BBC News Online was tuning up for launch on the fourth. At the time, the corporation seemed to have been promising a rather television-like experience:
The statement ‘This is BBC News Online’, accompanied by the World Service signature tune Lillibullero, could become as famous as ‘This is London’ when the Corporation’s 24-hour rolling Internet news service is launched next week (4 November).
News Online, which is the first comprehensive Internet news service to be launched by the BBC, is to have hourly audio bulletins especially packaged for it by the World Service. Other news, divided into UK News, World News, Business, Science and Technology, and Sport, will be presented as text and graphics.
…
News Online is to gather material from the full gamut of the BBCs newsgathering resources. It is to be ‘pushed’ to users via channels on web-browsers. The BBC already has a channel on Microsoft Internet Explorer 4.0 and will have one on the next version of the Netscape browser, which will be launched by the end of the year.
…
The site employs 30 journalists, but their role will largely entail the laying out and editing of material garnered from other sources. The service will also have close links with News 24, the 24-hour television rolling news service which is to be launched on 9 November.”
The following week, published 7 November, there was a longer feature about the new site which referred to it having launched “earlier this week”. (That issue also noted plans for the launch of regional news services on Ceefax, which was a venerable service even then, but is now beginning to disappear from terrestrial television because of digital switchover.)
There is more support for the 4 November date in Stuart Allan’s excellent history, Online News, which cites a Guardian article from 3 November 1997 in which then head of news Tony Hall is interviewed about the following day’s launch. Allan also cites an article from the Times on 5 November 1997.
The BBC’s On This Day feature endorses the 4 November date. Then again, there is one story on the low-bandwidth verision of the site dated 18:01 on the evening of 3 November 1997.
Unfortunately, Press Gazette didn’t publish any screen grabs in its coverage back in 1997 — records of what the site looked like on day one seem to have gone missing as well. Unfortunately, even Archive.org didn’t capture the site that day.
Tags: BBC
