The Origins of ONA: An Almost-True History

A tl;dr memoir of the early days of the Online News Association

The Online News Association was founded in the most appropriate way imaginable for a journalistic organization: as the result of a couple of newsies sitting around complaining to each other.

It was sometime around the middle of 1998, I believe. At the time, I was the Managing Editor of WSJ.com in New York, and my fellow whinger, Jai Singh, was Editor-in-Chief of CNet. Jai was coming through New York, so I took him to a delightful Chinese restaurant in the World Financial Center. But neither of us really appreciated the food. Instead, we spent the entire two-hour lunch bitching about our respective frustrations in dealing with clueless corporate overseers and the dismissive, often derisive attitudes toward online journalism and journalists that pervaded many traditional news organizations. “The CB radio of the ‘90s” was a phrase I heard more than once, in reference to the short-lived fad of an earlier decade.

To be sure, not everyone in traditional media felt that way. At around the same time, I was approached by a couple board members of the American Society of Newspaper Editors, an organization I belonged to by virtue of my ties to the print Wall Street Journal. One of the ASNE people, Rich Oppel of the Austin American-Statesman, was convinced of the growing and lasting importance of the online medium. What, he wanted to know, did ASNE need to do to position itself to be the go-to leadership organization for digital journalism?

I thought a bit and gave him several recommendations. One, as I recall it, was to change the name of the group to the American Society of News Editors, dropping the “paper.” “You don’t even have to change the logo,” I told him. Another was to be willing to expand the membership to include leaders not just of print-affiliated sites like mine, but also of digitally native organizations. The specific example I cited was Merrill Brown, the editor of MSNBC.com (then a straight news organization owned by Microsoft and NBC, and not the left-leaning opinion-driven cable network it is today).

Mind you, I had no idea if Merrill actually would have wanted to be a member of ASNE. (I still don’t know, to this day.) But he was, like me, a veteran of print who would have fit right in with a roomful of newspaper editors. If ASNE wasn’t going to be comfortable with a guy like Merrill because of his site’s lack of a print analogue, I figured, there was no way it could possibly accommodate itself to the far less traditional figures and organizations that surely would develop in the future.

Not to be

A month or two later, Rich got back to me. He tried, he said ruefully, but my suggestions were just too radical for the ASNE board. To be honest, I wasn’t really surprised. But as far as I was concerned, there was a train pulling out of the station, and ASNE had just missed it.

My lunch with Jai and the ASNE experience were among the things rattling around my brain in late summer, 1998. Then as now, I often make it a point to work during the last week of August, when many others are on vacation and I have more time to think, and fewer interruptions. So I closed the door to my office, and tapped out a memo to Peter Kann, then the chairman and CEO of the Journal’s parent, Dow Jones. In the memo, I asked for a few thousand dollars in order to hold a meeting of like-minded leaders at other organizations to explore whether there was a need and desire to form an organization dedicated to recognizing excellence and promoting the highest standards and values of journalism in this new medium.

Meanwhile, I began emailing my counterparts at other organizations, or at least those I knew. Armed with enough at least tentative expressions of interest, I used Peter’s funding to rent a conference room at Chicago’s O’Hare Hilton, chosen for its central location and relative accessibility from anywhere in the country. The main downside: I couldn’t find a date in the early fall that worked for enough people, so wound up booking the meeting for the first week of December and praying for the weather gods to be kind.

A good omen

They were. When I arrived, bundled in my warmest coat and scarf, the temperature was a balmy 66, the warmest Dec. 4 in Chicago history. (You could look it up.) I took it as a good omen.

In my mind, at least, the 20 or so attendees at that meeting, plus subsequent pre-organizational meetings in New York and San Francisco, constitutes the founding group of ONA. Others will have to document the names — many of my early ONA files were in my World Financial Center office, and lost on 9/11. But to me they are heroes all.

Jon Hart, then of the Dow, Lohnes law firm in Washington (and now at NPR) was one of the first people I reached out to. I’ll never understand why he said yes, but thank goodness he did; he and the firm were indispensable in helping establish the legal infrastructure of the organization. Time.com’s Janice Castro brought invaluable perspective on how other journalistic organizations worked, from her time as a director of the Overseas Press Club. Paul Maidment, then the editor of FT.com, came all the way from London. Merrill Brown — the very stalking horse I had used in my ASNE conversations — couldn’t come but dispatched one of his senior editors, Lynn Povich, to represent MSNBC’s interests; she and Jamie Heller, then of TheStreet.com, largely created the Online Journalism Awards, working with Sree Srinivasan, then a professor at the Columbia School of Journalism. (A little later, Merrill was critical in securing important funding for ONA from the Knight Foundation, whose board he was on.)

The inaugural address

When we made the definitive decision to form the organization, I was chosen to be president, which had a better sound to it than the more accurate “ringleader.” My inaugural address, as it were, consisted of an impassioned speech to my fellow founders. “If you will put your faith and trust in my wisdom, judgment and organizational skills,” I told them, “then we are all doomed. Because I have no real idea what I’m doing. The only way this works is if everyone here takes ownership of the organization starting right now.”

Thank God they believed me. People stepped up and took responsibility for the various huge tasks before us — the awards, the conference planning, meetups, articles of incorporation, the application for tax-exempt status. It was, I must tell you, a remarkable thing to see a bunch of journalists — most of whom are, by nature, not joiners — working together on the enterprise that became ONA. If there’s ever an ONA Hall of Fame, the first plaques belong to people like Jill Blackman, Bruce Koon, Doug Feaver, Tom Regan, MJ Bear, Elizabeth Osder, Jim Kennedy, Neil Chase, Ruth Gersh and Michael Silberman.¹

Some of those decisions we made in the early days still reverberate today. One was that we would be a low-dues organization of individuals rather than one with companies or organizations as members. Another was the name. I had used “Online News Association” as a placeholder but had no particular pride of authorship over it. When I asked for other ideas, everyone said, “That’s fine, just go with that.” (Today, of course, the name is a little redundant; I mean, what news isn’t online?)

Unfortunately, I failed abjectly in my efforts to secure the domain “ona.org.” Let me tell you, don’t let the starched whites fool you: Those Ontario nurses are tough. Eventually, I bought the domains “journalists.org” and “journalist.org” off Steve Outing for a couple thousand dollars.

Where did I get the money? Who knows? I followed every avenue or opportunity anyone suggested to scrape up a few bucks wherever I could, being considerably hampered by the fact that I had no experience in setting up a non-profit and no idea what I was doing.

The supplicant

At one point, someone — I’m betting it was Sree — referred me to a guy named Jon Funabiki, who was a media officer at the mighty Ford Foundation. At the appointed time, I presented myself at Ford’s impressive New York offices, where I made my timid pitch for the incipient organization and asked humbly about the processes that would be required to apply for a small grant. (I can’t even remember how much I was seeking, though the figure of $6,000 sticks in my mind.) What forms would need to be filled out? What documents provided? How should the grant application be written? I literally knew nothing about how the system worked.

“OK,” Jon said. Then, as I recall, silence.

“OK ….?” I finally said. “So, what do I do?”

“No, I don’t think you understand,” he said. “OK. You can have the money.”

I was floored. “But don’t you need forms, applications?” I asked. “How do I account for the money?”

“Send me an email after you’ve spent it, and tell me what you spent it on,” Jon said. To this day, I wonder if anyone at Ford knows the critical role the foundation played in establishing ONA. I also wonder if Jon, who’s now the director of the Renaissance Journalism Institute in San Francisco, kept some sort of secret slush fund in a safe in his office. I’d like to think so.²

While we were busy looking for money, there were a couple of cases where unsolicited money appeared to be looking for us. Two over-the-transom offers of funding I recall came from, in one case, a foundation associated with a tobacco company, and in another an organization associated with a family I had, until then, never heard of: the Koch brothers. In each case, I politely declined the overtures, only after the fact informing the board about them. (No one disagreed.) I had no idea what the motivations were for the offers — still don’t — but they just didn’t pass the sniff test.

Without much money, we became adept at schnorring. The OJA partnership with Columbia, with its unparalleled expertise in administering journalistic prize programs, came as the result of a deal with J-school Dean Tom Goldstein. Adam Clayton Powell III regularly allowed us use of Freedom Forum facilities to hold events and panels.

Snail’s pace

Mostly, though, I remember those first few years as largely a grind of constructing a solid foundation and infrastructure for ONA. I know a lot of folks were impatient with the pace of progress, and I couldn’t really blame them; while we were plodding along at what felt like a tortoise’s pace, other Internet-related organizations were jackrabbiting past us, expanding rapidly on the momentum generated by the dot-com boom. But our caution turned out to be a virtue when the boom turned to bust and even some very large organizations, such as the New York New Media Association, ceased to exist.

Slowly, bit by bit, we got our act together. Dianne Lynch, then a professor at Ithaca College (and now president of Stephens College in Missouri) inexplicably devoted her academic sabbatical to becoming ONA’s first (albeit unpaid) executive director, bringing order out of chaos and establishing an illustrious tradition that has continued through the retired but never retiring Jane McDonnell and our own Irving Washington. We were also able to commission Howard Finberg and Martha Stone to conduct what became a landmark study on the credibility of online news.

The first ONA conference, held in December 2000 at Columbia, was essentially a luncheon to announce the winners of the first OJAs. Most of that day is a total blur to me. Indeed, I only have two clear memories. One is that by the time I went to get something to eat, the buffet had been cleaned out; my entire lunch consisted of potato-chip crumbs, which I took as a good thing because it meant the turnout had exceeded the expectations on which we’d based our food plans. My other memory is overhearing Sree’s end of a conversation with Matt Drudge, who called, irate, after the OJAs were announced to demand to know why he didn’t win one. “But Matt, you didn’t submit an entry,” I remember Sree saying, or words to that effect. “To win, you first have to enter.”

Actually, though, it’s the second ONA conference, which was held in late October 2001, that I personally regard as the more important milestone.

A changed environment

So much had changed in the 11 months between the two conferences. The sudden evaporation of the dot-com boom had left a trail of layoffs, bankruptcies and, in some of those print newsrooms and organizations, a certain sense of “we-told-you-so” satisfaction at the travails of online news operations. The horrific attacks of 9/11 had traumatized the entire country. Then, a week later, a series of mysterious anthrax attacks further shook the nation. Meanwhile, we had scheduled the conference for Berkeley, a location that made sense given Northern California’s importance in the development of the medium, but far away (and an expensive airline ticket in the midst of a recession) from the East Coast media centers where so many of our members were based. I was seriously worried that no one would show.

I needn’t have been. With my old friend and celebrated Wall Street Journal technology columnist Walt Mossberg as the keynote speaker, we drew an audience that I remember as decent-sized — and that I regarded as a huge triumph given what both the country and the industry were going through at that moment.

The Poynter Institute posted a transcript of my remarks that day. They came from the heart.

“The 1990s, the decade that gave birth to this new news medium, are truly over,” I said. “We are no longer an experiment. We are no longer a ‘project.’ In the aftermath of Sept. 11, we’ve seen people come online for news in unprecedented numbers. We are now a major source of news and information for millions of people across the nation and around the world…

“The medium, and how we use it, will continue to develop and evolve,” I went on. “That’s what makes it so damn much fun. But it’s up to us to make sure that evolution takes place in a context in which there is no compromise on the journalistic values that ONA represents.

“Those are the values worth standing up for, because they are the values that make us indispensable to our audience.”

Felt that way then. Feel that way now.

. . .

[1] Easily my biggest fear in writing this piece is of leaving out people who were hugely important. I’ve already had numerous moments of “How could I have failed to mention that person?” I’ve already updated the piece a couple times and will continue to do so. Friends, fact-check me here — if you see I’ve made a horrific omission, let me know! And if you’re the one I’ve horrifically omitted, please accept my humblest apologies. I’m working from highly fallible, 20-year-old memories.

[2] Jon Funabiki says: “I think you may have romanticized the experience. I’m sure there was paperwork involved — I couldn’t just hand out cash, you know. And your article prompted me to look up the amount, which was $25,000. You’re underestimating your selling skills.” Romanticized? Moi? 😎 But it was still a hell of an investment in an untried idea, critically important to us and done with an absolute minimum of red tape. And I really wanted my fantasy about the safe full of money to be true!