As many of you may or may not know, I have been the online editor here at the Emerald for almost three years. To my knowledge, I was the first online editor this newspaper had ever had, as they just had one webmaster before who did the work on the site.

Now, my reign here has come to an end. I’m graduating in June, with a BS in Journalism, and a minor in CIT. And while I’m going to miss it, it’ll be nice to move on and get on with my life.
But it has been a memorable few years sitting at this desk hacking away at a Web site that probably sapped up more of my college time than my homework did. I remember first getting here, when the editors of the Emerald had really no idea what to do with me. I didn’t really know either. It took me a good month to figure out how this Web site was managed and structured before I could plan an attack on how to fix it. And instead of trying to fix it, I decided to just completely overhaul it.
So at the beginning of the 1998-1999 school year, then-editor Ryan Frank, webmaster Broc Nelson and I decided that it needed to be done, and started getting to work. It was the 100-year anniversary of the Emerald, after all, so what better way to celebrate than put out a new design. I didn’t realize until I started working on the thing that the Emerald’s Web site is quite large: well over 20,000 files spanning almost six years worth of stories. It finally went live on Febuary 15, 1999, about a month later than planned. Dailyemerald.com was officially born.
So what then? Well, we added a weather section, interactive polls and message boards, easier feedback options and a bunch of other little features to make the web site easier to use.
But the one thing that the business folks at the Emerald wanted was the ability to run ads on the web site to increase revenue coming to the Emerald. The problem was that dailyemerald.com, while it sounds commercial, was still being hosted on the University of Oregon’s servers. And because of the acceptable use policy regarding University computers, we were allowed to run banner ads on the Web site.
And after several months of research, we finally cut a deal with ispi, a company based out of Nebraska, who is providing not only server space for our nearly 300 megabytes of content, but a database backend to store articles in so we can update and maintain the site much easier than before. And we were finally able to run ads. Granted, this whole online ads thing is really new to the ad department here, but they’re learning.
But I think the bigger part of all this is the significance of breaking away from the University. While being hosted on University servers does have its advantages (it’s free and the servers are good machines), there were some problems with it, and the biggest one being that we had to rely on the University to not screw us over.
Most of the time, this would never be a problem. But what some people don’t know is the Oregon Daily Emerald is a completely independent operation. We’re an advertising-funded non-profit paper, and the only money we receive from students is a small amount added to the student fees so that you won’t have to pay for the Emerald at the stands. We don’t receive any money from the University, we rent our space on the third floor in the EMU, and nobody, other than the people in this room, controls our editorial content – not the journalism school, not the administration, no one.
And we have been for over 25 years. And I think it was appropriate that the Web site, which has been hosted on University servers since its induction several years ago, moved off campus. While having someone say something about our content because of the fact it was stored on the University servers has never been a problem, it could’ve been sometime down the road as the Web site starts to become a bigger part of this paper.
The Emerald has one of the best Web sites in the country. It’s not usually our policy to brag about awards, but many people don’t know how well this Web site has done the last couple years: Collegiate Press Network: 1999
Gold Medal Award, 1998 Honorable Mention; Associated Collegiate Press/U-Wire Online Newspaper of the Year: 1999 2nd place, 1998 3rd place; Student Society of News Design: 2000 3rd Place; Society of Professional Journalists NW Region: 1999 1st place; Oregon Newspaper Publisher’s Association: 2000 1st Place. Granted, the print edition of this paper has won hundreds of awards, the few us online folk have aren’t bad.
And the writers for the Emerald deserve most of the credit for this, writing stories to be published online long before their deadline for the print edition. The best example being when we ran the story about Phil Knight pulling all future donations to the University. That day, we received over 75,000 hits on the site, mostly due to the fact that we had this story online several hours before our paper went to press. We had over 100 requests to post feedback on the site, and we had news sites all over the web linking to our stories. Without the willingness of the writers to cooperate with me, this would’ve never happened. And these awards wouldn’t have been there to claim.
But before I go and get out of here, there are a few people I’d like to thank. I’d like to thank Ryan Frank for giving me the leeway to completly redo the way we do thing on the site and for missing my deadline a bit. I’d like to thank my current editor, Laura Cadiz, for giving me permission to write my online columns. Even though I probably only had about 20 loyal readers (counting the copy editors that read them), it was a nice outlet for my vents about the technology industry. I’d also like to thank the business and advertising staff here for making me realize that there are a lot of people out there who want to be a part of the online world, but don’t have a damn clue what they’re doing. And I’d like to thank Broc Nelson, my webmaster for a year and a half here, and Timur Insepov, my current webmaster, for working as hard as they did. Considering that all the work over the last couple years on this site was done by the webmaster and I, I’m really glad to have two guys work for me that were as easy going as them.
Last, and certainly not least, I’d like to thank my wife for dealing with me. We weren’t married until this year, but she dealt with me plenty of times where I had to spend a lot of time here.
Well, it’s been fun, folks. I’ve had a good time here, and maybe I’ll check in in the future. I don’t know if the new online editor, Carol Rink, will keep up the tradition of the online-only column, so we’ll have to wait and see.
So have a good life everyone. If you want to keep in touch, you can e-mail me at [email protected], ICQ at 7739361, soon at www.orty.com or if you’re in Bend, I’ll be there — probably catching up on the sleep I lost over the last four years.