SFGate turns 15: A timeline
From News Director Vlae Kershner:
Today is SFGate's 15th birthday. We can hardly wait to get our learner's permit!
Rushed online weeks ahead of schedule during the 1994 San Francisco newspaper strike,
The Gate, as it was called then, attracted a grand total of 105 visitors on its first day.
The Gate on Oct. 25, 1996. The homepage background was sky blue during the day and black at night.
Our longest-tenured employee, Director of Operations Chris Hallenbeck, recalls that when he started in 1996, The Gate shared an office on Mary Street with a Chronicle service that offered sports scores by telephone. "It was very dot-com," he said. "Our general manager John Coate would hook up an amplifier and play guitar on Friday afternoons."
When I joined SFGate at the height of the tech bubble in 1999, dot-commers were being offered promotions, bonuses and raises to keep them from jumping ship. The kitchen counter in our old office in the KRON studios on Van Ness was filled with Snapple, energy bars and chips, free to employees. Why? Our leading advertiser, Webvan, ran low on cash selling home-delivery groceries at a loss and started paying us in snacks. Not surprisingly, that nutty, but exciting era soon ended.
Unlike many newspaper sites, SFGate was designed to operate semi-independently of The Chronicle, as reflected in our separate brand name--one that represents both a certain landmark and the idea that we serve as a bridge between the Bay Area and the rest of the world.
As you can see in the virtually news-free 1996 homepage reproduced above, SFGate has never been just the online version of the newspaper. Instead, we strive to be an irreverent, high-energy homepage for the Bay Area, offering a wide variety of news, entertainment, multimedia, blogs and more. Building on the work of The Chronicle's outstanding reporters, photographers and columnists, we try to start conversations and ask our readers to add facts, opinions and their own experiences.
Unfortunately, the news business has been going through some hard times, particularly newspapers, and won't support nearly as many full-time journalists as it once did. However, despite the challenges, the news is not all bad. Just check the growth curves. Our current monthly averages of more than 12 million unique users and 120 million page views (data from Omniture) are about seven times what they were a decade ago, as is our online revenue.
As we grow into adulthood, we look forward to continuing to innovate and evolve. We'd like to thank you, our actively involved online community, for suggesting many of our improvements and always keeping us on our toes.
SFGate history -- A timeline
1981--Electronic delivery of The Chronicle and Examiner begins via telephone connection to the Bay Area's "estimated 2,000 to 3,000 home computer users."
1985-- Chronicle Publishing Co. acquires Computer Sports World, a sports videotex company, places terminals in BART stations. Many in the industry believe closed videotex systems are the future of electronic news.
1993--The San Francisco Newspaper Agency, which handled business operations for both The Chronicle and the Hearst-owned Examiner, begins planning for a "computer bulletin board service."
1994--March: A test version of The Gate appears live on the web, which founders term "the first large-market newspaper site in the world." A full launch is delayed, in part due to tense labor relations.
November 3: The Gate is launched a few weeks ahead of schedule due to the San Francisco newspaper strike, containing links to both The Chronicle and the Examiner. The Newspaper Guild debuts its own site, the Free Press, nearly simultaneously. The first day, The Gate gets 105 sign-ons. A few days later, both the management and union sites claim about 20,000 hits a day. Personnel from both sites combine at The Gate following the 12-day strike.
1995-- First news site to offer content not contained in the newspaper, searchable archives and classifieds.
First news site to offer open public forums (Conferences).
1996--An early version of the first customizable news feed reader is launched (FishWrap).
1997-- Chronicle Publishing buys The Gate from the S.F. Newspaper Agency, combines it with KRON's site under the leadership of general manager John Coate to become the first site to combine content from newspapers and television stations. The Examiner starts its own site but continues to allow its content to be published on The Gate.
First site to webcast live Major League Baseball games: Oakland Athletics. Later, MLB figures out this Internet stuff might be worth some money and shuts us down.
1998: Floods in January. First month with 10 million page views.
The Gate changes its name to SFGate, to match its URL.
Online-only columnists begin: Derk Richardson (Hear and Now); Beth Lisick (Mae Hem); Hank Hyena (Odd Barkings)
1999-- "Convergence" is the buzzword, SFGate, The Chronicle and KRON conduct a joint project about the future called Bay Area 2020.
2000-- Mark Morford's online-only column, Mark Fiore's animated political cartoons begin.
Hearst Corp. acquires The Chronicle and SFGate, divests the Examiner. SFGate picks up several members of the old examiner.com staff and its most popular feature, Day in Pictures.
October-- Tight election campaign: First month with 25 million page views.
2001-- Robert Cauthorn, vice president/digital media, assumes control of SFGate. One of his early initiatives is Top Jobs, an advertising feature widely copied by newspaper websites.
SFGate and KRON, which have been sold separately, end their association.
Sept. 11: Homepage quickly rebuilt to consist entirely of 9/11 stories and links to videos. Site traffic overwhelms counting mechanisms.
2002-- Site redesigned. Homepage loses its sky-blue background, except for the header, which is revised to include an image of the San Francisco skyline.
2003-- January: Bad weather. First month with 50 million page views.
March: Daily Dish debuts, quickly becomes one of our most popular features.
2004--Peter Negulescu becomes vice president/digital media. His initiatives include a sitewide redesign and the rebuild from scratch of the back-end system, which allows newsroom editors to edit Gate pages.
2005--First Podcast (about the Podcasting phenomenon).
First blog: Culture Blog.
2006--January: It's raining. First month with 75 million page views.
November: Hearst enters an advertising and content-sharing partnership with Yahoo!, among first newspaper companies to do so.
2007--August: Reader comments on all articles launched.
2008--Michele Slack becomes vice president/digital media. Her initiatives include a homepage resdesign and links with social networks including Twitter and Facebook.
March: First database.
November: Presidential election. First month with 100 million page views.
2009-- Facebook page, City Brights, neighborhood sites launched.
September: Record traffic, 124.6 million page views, led by Burning Man photos and the Bay Bridge weekend closure.
Please share your memories of SFGate's first 15 years in the comments section.
(Thanks to Kay Marie Jacobson, Kevin Skaggs and Marcus Chan for helping me with this).| November 03 2009 at 07:39 AM
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