How Britain’s media went digital
It’s not just 30 years since the first .uk site went live — we’ve also had more than 20 years of the old guard of the British media adapting to publishing online. Here’s how some bigger names started out.
1. Daily Telegraph
In 1994, the Telegraph moved its operation online — the first British newspaper to do so.
At this time there were probably no more than 10,000 websites — and the “Electronic Telegraph” (as it was known) was typical of site design for the time — mostly plain text with only a few small images so as not to test the primitive dial-up connections that almost every visitor will have been using. There were around 35 million internet users worldwide in 1994; today, more than three billion people have online access. The first majorly popular web browser, Mosaic, had only been released the year before.
The top story for the day (15 November 1994) was about a Tory government blocking an inquiry into a “cash for questions” scandal; second on the bill was the news that three kidnapped British backpackers were being threatened with beheading if the Indian government did not release nine imprisoned Islamic militants. Third was a story about the government struggling to get its way in negotiations with other nations within the EU. How things change.
2. BBC
The BBC first registered bbc.co.uk in 1991, but its first website was 1995's strange BBC Networking Club, a kind of informal directory of BBC-related things on the early web.
As well as listing email contacts for various popular shows, from the BBC News to The Sky at Night, it featured “Babbage”, the site’s “internet mascot and guide” whose job was “hacking a path through the WWW info-rainforest for you” (i.e. it acted as a proto-search engine, listing sites of interest, like Yahoo!.)
The BBC closed the Networking Club after a couple of years after concerns that the organisation was unwittingly competing with the private ISPs that were also offering customers online content to go with their internet connections.
The “real” bbc.co.uk — and the BBC news site — that we know today launched in 1997, with a relatively clean blue and white colour scheme. One of the site’s first big successes came immediately in the aftermath of the death of Princess Diana — the site hosted a hub where people could visit and pay tribute, or browse a gallery of Diana-related images. It is still accessible today. BBC News Online won best website at the BAFTAs three years running, until the category was abolished in 2001.
3. The Guardian
The Guardian technically went online in 1995 with GO2, the website for its technology supplement, and its sports section followed relatively soon after on football.co.uk in 1997 — but the newspaper as whole didn’t get its own site until late 1999. It had a muted design of blue and gold boxes on a white background, with black and white images.
At the time, the internet was still not comprehensive across the country — and as the new millennium dawned, only a quarter of UK households had a web connection.
4. Daily Mail
By far the most popular British media website internationally, MailOnline (originally known as dailymail.co.uk) was a relative latecomer to the scene, only launching in 2003. Like many newspapers, the Mail’s owners feared that a large website could cannibalise their print readership. The stories that did make it onto the site were hidden behind a paywall.
The site also featured a forum at launch. “For the first time, we are able to give Mail readers a forum to communicate and air their strong opinions,” reportedly said Andrew Hart, then-director of new media.
Even though 2003 was a late launch date by the standards of the industry, if doesn’t appear to have done MailOnline, which the site rebranded to in 2006, any problems — it now regularly gets more than 200m visitors a month.
5. The Mirror
While in recent years Trinity Mirror hasn’t been afraid to experiment with new forms of digital journalism, the original mirror.co.uk — which launched in 1998 — replicated the brashness of the tabloid’s print edition.
For a while after launch the site ran “Carol Vorderman’s Guide to the Web” as a regular feature (this would have been at the height of her mathsy Countdownfame, so this counts as quite the geeky get) but, unfortunately, its contents have been lost to time.
The site offered the same mix of soap and sports news as the paper — but one extra feature it offered that the newspaper couldn’t was animated gifs.
6. Shetland Times
Local papers were going online in the 1990s as well as nationals, and one that’s particularly important in the history of British digital media is theShetland Times, serving the resident of the Shetland Islands of Scotland.
The Shetland Times’ main rival is the Shetland News, and the two went head-to-head in a peculiar civil case in 1996. The Times took out an injunction against theNews to stop it using hyperlinks — the News was republishingTimes headlines in full, and when a visitor clicked on one, they’d be taken to the Times story embedded within the News’ site. It’s a practice known as “deep linking”, and the Shetland Times v News example was the first test case for it in the UK.
After much legal wrangling, the case was settled out of court, with the News agreeing to acknowledge the Times as the source of any stories it referenced on its site.
This story is one of 30 celebrating the launch of .uk domain names in 1985. To read the others visit our 30 Years of .uk hub. To start your own .uk story check out www.agreatplacetobe.uk.
