The World Wide Web was barely a gleam in Al Gore's eye in 1994 when the Standard-Examiner's publisher hired a technician to set up a computer bulletin board system. He began figuring out how to get the daily news and classifieds online. The experiment with the StandardNET BBS was to see what Standard-Examiner readers might be interested in via online, and to tinker around with the question of how someday the company might make money with it. Seven years and several technicians later, the Standard- Examiner's online operation has 18 employees, is continuing to learn what readers want, and has begun to ring cash registers for Internet advertisers and the newspaper's owners.
Every next stage seems to be more challenging.
A look back through the online age to the distant past of 1995, when the StandardNET Web site was born upon the ashes of the BBS, may give perspective toward evaluating prospects for the coming years. We manually updated the stories. It was a very modest effort. It was enough solid information to attract hundreds of daily readers and, for the first time, serious Internet advertising. Tiffany Tuft joined StandardNET that year as part of the advertising team.