IT has been an astonishing, even excellent, adventure. And very quick. Less than three years ago The Irish Times on the Web recorded first month statistics of about 10,000 "hits" or accesses. Last April, that figure was 14 million. Each day, thousands of people across the world use The Irish Times on the Web to get the most complete Irish news service on the web. And the word is spreading, so the demand for our service grows, as more people hear of us and as more people go online.
But even the most optimistic in our project team would have struggled to envisage the kind of success and appreciation the service now enjoys around the globe when we first stumbled across the World Wide Web.
While on a research visit in the US in the summer of 1994, a small Irish Times team came across a new piece of technology called the Mosaic browser which allowed navigation of a then little known part of the Internet, called the World Wide Web. Compared to the elaborate browsers of today, Mosaic was a primitive piece of software, but it did offer publishers two important advantages - the ability to publish their own information online without the help of proprietary online services such as Compuserve and America Online; and the ability to apply hierarchical values to that information, as do print newspapers every day. It also offered The Irish Times the chance to reach our emigrant market quickly and cost effectively.
When we returned to Dublin, we hooked up with a small Trinity College campus company, IEunet, which had the technology but no regularly updated content. We, of course, had content in buckets. We were not only the first Irish newspaper to go online, but were among the first 30 newspapers in the world.
Initially, we just put the main stories of the day online. Then the reaction began. People from all over the world began to e-mail us at itwired.irish-times.com with the glad tidings that we had struck a chord with the Irish diaspora.
For those who cannot easily pick up their Irish Times at the shop or have it dropped through their letter boxes, the opportunity to stay in daily contact with home via a familiar and trusted information source is one of the wonders of the Information Age.
Within a year, supported enthusiastically by the Editor and the Irish Times commercial management, and with valuable grant assistance from Forbairt, we had decided to put in place our own technical structure and a staff to operate it. Robert O'Dea, a young Irishman working in the Chicago Tribune's online service subsidiary, came home to be project manager. Then last year four journalist joined along with more technical marketing and advertising staff. We launched an e-mail edition in May of last year and a month later relaunched our web site complete with advertising, images and a new design.
Today, our online edition contains the bulk of the print copy's contents, plus an ever increasing range of additional material. We have experimented with interactive discussion groups and more than 20,000 people have signed our guest book. Most readers, about 66 per cent, are based in North America though readership is rising throughout the rest of the world.
The projects we have implemented include a searchable data base of recruitment advertising (an average 16,500 searches are carried out each week), the St Patrick's Festival Around the World site, the General Election site and, most recently, Dyoublong, a special site to mark Bloomsday. In the process we have garnered numerous plaudits, including an honourable mention in online awards of the US trade magazine, Editor And Publisher. Only one other non US web site, the Jerusalem Post, received a mention.
It is not all plain sailing. The online market has developed rapidly in a short spell, but has yet to produce a convincing revenue stream for any web publication. Most services on the web are free though there are moves afoot to charge for content. The recent decision by the Economist to do so will be watched eagerly by other publishers who, at the moment, rely principally on advertising to offset their costs. The Irish Times on the Web enjoys a strong advertising base, but a big challenge will be to match our editorial success with a suitable financial return.
THE next major phase of online publishing will be push technology in which waves of content will be delivered to subscribers, the latest of what promises to be an endless river of change. But throughout all The Irish Times on the Web will remain constant, reflecting the newspaper's core values whatever the technology.