Nando
Encyclopedia
In the early 1990s, NandO or Nando.net was one of the first Internet newspaper sites.
newspaper in Raleigh, North Carolina
. In 1993 George Schlukbier
http://www.google.com/search?q=george+schlukbier&sourceid=mozilla-search&start=0&start=0&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official, a news librarian from McClatchy Newspapers became the first New Media Director, hired by Frank Daniels III, editor of the daily paper, to build this new division. The core developers for this effort to prove the Internet was a better partner for newspapers than AOL or Prodigy, were Dave Livingston (nicknamed "Sleepy Squirrel"), Charles Hall, James Calloway, Alfred Filler, Fraser Van Asch, "Zonker" Harris, Mike Emmett and Schlukbier. This team built a GUI to the Internet using The Major BBS as a front end, extended to use traditional Internet applications such as Gopher, WAIS, Lynx and Telnet. With this ad-hoc system, Nando.net provided classified news and became a commercial Internet service provider
(ISP) in North Carolina
's Research Triangle area, which encompasses Raleigh, Durham
, and Chapel Hill
.
Into this mix came a Sun SPARC computer. Transferring data from the Tandem to the SPARC, required a common interface, and that interface was X.25
. X.25, although developed for satellite communication, was one of the few standards actually implemented by most hardware vendors.
The advantage of the proprietary systems (such as GalactiComm) was that they used special software and hardware to handle more than one user on a single PC. The GalactiComm hardware supported up to sixteen serial cards, each with multiple RS-232 ports.
The GalactiComm software also supported the X.25 protocol, so there was a path between all the various systems, however circuitous it appears from today's perspective.
One last point, with the arrival of the World Wide Web, users no longer needed a terminal emulator (or a BBS), but they now needed a network layer for their Windows 3.1 PC. The Nando Help Desk was charged with stepping a new user through downloading the required TCP/IP network software via the BBS or floppy disk, then installing both it and a browser such as Mosaic... over the phone... and also explaining what the "web" was!
was America's most-wanted computer hacker (1994–1995) he was living in Raleigh and using cell phones to hack into ISP's and then telneting into unsuspecting UNIX servers (like Nando) and creating directories/files and deleting all traces. Nando technicians tried, but never quite managed, to get a fix on Mitnick's location. All the while, the company was in communication with the FBI. In fact, it was required to be in touch with the FBI. During this period, increasingly computer-savvy young people were starting to figure out the holes in Unix. Life was changing at Nando.
-compatible website front end, and the NandO Times was born—one of the first updated-around-the-clock news and sports websites.
Nando invented its own model of how newspapers could handle online production, news, sales and help desks while developing new online products.
At first, News & Observer copy desk staff (called sub-editors in the UK) fed stories to the Nando Times from the newspaper's main newsroom, using aging SII newswire editing terminals to add intermediate mark-up codes for further processing into HTML. Nando developers figured out how to semi-automate newswire story conversion and posting of news photos to the site, including an early Java-powered animated photo display, although the photos were never fully integrated with related stories.
Shortly before the Daniels family sold the News & Observer company to the McClatchy newspaper chain, Nando and the online News & Observer became separate operations and Nando editors moved into a separate building. Seth Effron became Nando's executive editor, Zonker Harris was the managing editor, Mike Emmett, who had a long career as a writer and editor with several of the U.S.'s largest dailies, was the sports editor, while Bruce Siceloff headed the NewsObserver.com staff. Michael Carmean, who had headed the copydesk staff, departed. Other early Nando personnel included Charles S. Powell (the "Evangelist"), Beth Ames, Fraser Van Asch, Gene Wang, Kirk House, Ari Spanos, Alfred Filler, Denise Long, Joe Sterling, Joyce Garcia, Dawn Harris and Sam Barnes. Barnes sometimes worked from the office of the N&O-owned Chapel Hill News, inspiring Bob Stepno, a Nando part-timer and University of North Carolina
journalism doctoral student, to move his weekend morning shift there. In 2000, Schlukbier and Total Sports parted ways. Also leaving were Emmett and Harris, who both went to Miami to work for Terra.com, the world's largest Hispanic Web site. Emmett moved onto to Time Warner/CNN as managing editor of NASCAR.com, then Greenville Online as assistant editor and finally, before retiring, Media General's Western Carolina Regional Manager. Harris continues to work for the Daniels family and is based in Cary, N.C.
Services Nando provided in 1994:
After the McClatchy merger, Nando New Media evolved into McClatchy New Media, with the output of the Nando newsroom channelled to the "24 Hour News" section of all McClatchy newspapers' websites.
, Reuters
, Agence France-Presse
, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times
, Scripps-Howard, Bloomberg
and more—a year or before most of those news organizations created their own Web sites, and apparently before the wire services recognized an "online edition" as something separate from the printed newspaper. AP and Nando soon became allies in developing the model of how newspapers would use wire services.
Nando editors selected stories, wrote fresh headlines and sorted the wire service stories into news category pages—National, World, Political, Sports, Business etc. Nando's editors sometimes created "combined wires" stories or rewrote story leads. The Nando Times briefly experimented with original news reporting, including sports and election coverage, but became almost exclusively an aggregator and enhancer of news from traditional news services.
Nando excelled at posting "topic" pages carrying dozens of links for developing stories, such as the April, 1995, Oklahoma City bombing
http://www.ajr.org/article.asp?id=2006 and the death of Diana, Princess of Wales
http://www.nandotimes.com/nt/images/diana/. (The Diana memorial pages, hundreds of headlines and pictures from Aug. 31 through Sept. 26, 1997, were among the last documents left on the Nando site in March 2005, although the linked headline stories had expired from the server.)
programming early, creating a Java-powered rotation of news photos on its home page in 1996, linked to photo gallery pages.
Behind the scenes, the most lasting demonstration of Nando Media's Java programming was its Digital Work Bench content management system. The Java-based CMS was written from the ground up starting in 1999 by the company's development team, becoming the default publishing system for the Nando Times. It was later adopted by several McClatchy properties and was eventually re-written entirely in Perl
.
newspaper chain http://www.mcclatchy.com/about/. (The News & Observer's 1995 efforts also had included a computer-assisted investigation of the North Carolina hog industry http://www.pulitzer.org/year/1996/public-service/works/about.html, which won it the 1996 Pulitzer Prize
for public service.)
, now part of EarthLink
) and cut back its exploration of original news coverage, which had included the 1996 election campaign http://archives.cjr.org/year/96/1/trail.asp. McClatchy shifted the focus of "Nando New Media" to serve its newspapers and other clients, while Frank Daniels III and other early Nando executives left to create Internet startups focused on community news (Koz
) and sports (Total Sports).
With Nando's changing role, The News & Observer established an interactive media division in 1997, led by Mark Choate. The new division produced newsobserver.com, an online newspaper publishing local news and advertising, as a complement to the national and international news published by Nando. Under Choate's direction, newsobserver.com quickly became one of the leading local newspaper web sites in the country. By 2001, The Media Audit ranked newsobserver.com third in the nation in terms of local market penetration for online newspapers, trailing washingtonpost.com and austin360.com. In that same year, Editor & Publisher awarded newsobserver.com with an EPpy, naming it the best online newspaper service in its circulation category.
The Nando Times pages were discontinued May 27, 2003, replaced with a "Dear readers" page of explanation, with a directory of McClatchy papers' individual sites where the former Nando Times content could be found. The editorial staff continued to process wire stories, which fed the "24 hour news" http://www.sacbee.com/24hour/ sections of other McClatchy properties, such as NewsObserver http://newsobserver.com and SacBee http://sacbee.com.
The Nando brand was abandoned by the McClatchy Company on March 3, 2005 in favor of the name McClatchy Interactive.
Inception
Nando was produced by the New Media division of The News & ObserverThe News & Observer
The News & Observer is the regional daily newspaper of the Research Triangle area of the U.S. State of North Carolina. The N&O, as it is popularly called, is based in Raleigh and also covers Durham, Cary, and Chapel Hill. The paper also has substantial readership in most of the state east of...
newspaper in Raleigh, North Carolina
Raleigh, North Carolina
Raleigh is the capital and the second largest city in the state of North Carolina as well as the seat of Wake County. Raleigh is known as the "City of Oaks" for its many oak trees. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the city's 2010 population was 403,892, over an area of , making Raleigh...
. In 1993 George Schlukbier
George Schlukbier
George Schlukbier is the North American innovator who in the 1990s built Nando, one of the early websites offered by a daily newspaper , and NandO Times, an early and much-copied online newspaper...
http://www.google.com/search?q=george+schlukbier&sourceid=mozilla-search&start=0&start=0&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official, a news librarian from McClatchy Newspapers became the first New Media Director, hired by Frank Daniels III, editor of the daily paper, to build this new division. The core developers for this effort to prove the Internet was a better partner for newspapers than AOL or Prodigy, were Dave Livingston (nicknamed "Sleepy Squirrel"), Charles Hall, James Calloway, Alfred Filler, Fraser Van Asch, "Zonker" Harris, Mike Emmett and Schlukbier. This team built a GUI to the Internet using The Major BBS as a front end, extended to use traditional Internet applications such as Gopher, WAIS, Lynx and Telnet. With this ad-hoc system, Nando.net provided classified news and became a commercial Internet service provider
Internet service provider
An Internet service provider is a company that provides access to the Internet. Access ISPs directly connect customers to the Internet using copper wires, wireless or fiber-optic connections. Hosting ISPs lease server space for smaller businesses and host other people servers...
(ISP) in North Carolina
North Carolina
North Carolina is a state located in the southeastern United States. The state borders South Carolina and Georgia to the south, Tennessee to the west and Virginia to the north. North Carolina contains 100 counties. Its capital is Raleigh, and its largest city is Charlotte...
's Research Triangle area, which encompasses Raleigh, Durham
Durham, North Carolina
Durham is a city in the U.S. state of North Carolina. It is the county seat of Durham County and also extends into Wake County. It is the fifth-largest city in the state, and the 85th-largest in the United States by population, with 228,330 residents as of the 2010 United States census...
, and Chapel Hill
Chapel Hill, North Carolina
Chapel Hill is a town in Orange County, North Carolina, United States and the home of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and UNC Health Care...
.
Networking
In 1993 networking standards were not as pervasive as they are now. The newspaper publishing tools were based on proprietary networking cards and terminals used with a Tandem mini-computer. AppleTalk over coax cable was the way Macintoshs communicated. Windows 3.1 did not even have a network layer installed by default.Into this mix came a Sun SPARC computer. Transferring data from the Tandem to the SPARC, required a common interface, and that interface was X.25
X.25
X.25 is an ITU-T standard protocol suite for packet switched wide area network communication. An X.25 WAN consists of packet-switching exchange nodes as the networking hardware, and leased lines, Plain old telephone service connections or ISDN connections as physical links...
. X.25, although developed for satellite communication, was one of the few standards actually implemented by most hardware vendors.
BBS Technology
Before the Web, most people accessed remote computers via dumb terminal emulators running on their PCs. BBS systems came in two flavors: DOS based and proprietary. DOS based systems required one PC and one modem for each incoming phone line. It was not uncommon for a BBS to have a hundred IBM PCs stacked up next to shelves of a hundred modems.The advantage of the proprietary systems (such as GalactiComm) was that they used special software and hardware to handle more than one user on a single PC. The GalactiComm hardware supported up to sixteen serial cards, each with multiple RS-232 ports.
The GalactiComm software also supported the X.25 protocol, so there was a path between all the various systems, however circuitous it appears from today's perspective.
One last point, with the arrival of the World Wide Web, users no longer needed a terminal emulator (or a BBS), but they now needed a network layer for their Windows 3.1 PC. The Nando Help Desk was charged with stepping a new user through downloading the required TCP/IP network software via the BBS or floppy disk, then installing both it and a browser such as Mosaic... over the phone... and also explaining what the "web" was!
Why 'Nando'?
The News & Observer newspaper's nickname, "The N&O," gave the site its name, presented online as NandO or Nando, apparently after the newspaper's News Library staff pointed out that the ampersand would create difficultes in database construction and so coined the title of NandO, according to Teresa Leonard, chief librarian of The News & Observer. The electronic edition went far beyond the original content of the North Carolina paper, which eventually was shifted to a different Web address [at http://newsobserver.com] maintained by a separate staff.'LHP' and 'CBGL'
The leaders of this emerging phenomenon gave themselves imaginative titles, a bit of whimsy that set a whacky, free-flying tone for company atmosphere and morale. Frank Daniels III was LHP, for "Lord High Protector." George Schlukbier was CBGL, for "Chief Bull Goose Looney." Employees followed suit with their own job titles. As in other internet start-up companies, there was frenzied activity 24-hours a day, seven days a week. A company lore evolved, with numerous stories such as the one about installing system upgrades and dropping dial-up customers by the rack. Even the FBI were regular players. During the period when Kevin MitnickKevin Mitnick
Kevin David Mitnick is a computer security consultant, author, and hacker. In the late 20th century, he was convicted of various computer- and communications-related crimes. At the time of his arrest, he was the most-wanted computer criminal in the United States.-Personal life:Mitnick grew up in...
was America's most-wanted computer hacker (1994–1995) he was living in Raleigh and using cell phones to hack into ISP's and then telneting into unsuspecting UNIX servers (like Nando) and creating directories/files and deleting all traces. Nando technicians tried, but never quite managed, to get a fix on Mitnick's location. All the while, the company was in communication with the FBI. In fact, it was required to be in touch with the FBI. During this period, increasingly computer-savvy young people were starting to figure out the holes in Unix. Life was changing at Nando.
Nando Times
In 1994 Nando.net added a Web server and a MosaicMosaic
Mosaic is the art of creating images with an assemblage of small pieces of colored glass, stone, or other materials. It may be a technique of decorative art, an aspect of interior decoration, or of cultural and spiritual significance as in a cathedral...
-compatible website front end, and the NandO Times was born—one of the first updated-around-the-clock news and sports websites.
Nando invented its own model of how newspapers could handle online production, news, sales and help desks while developing new online products.
At first, News & Observer copy desk staff (called sub-editors in the UK) fed stories to the Nando Times from the newspaper's main newsroom, using aging SII newswire editing terminals to add intermediate mark-up codes for further processing into HTML. Nando developers figured out how to semi-automate newswire story conversion and posting of news photos to the site, including an early Java-powered animated photo display, although the photos were never fully integrated with related stories.
Shortly before the Daniels family sold the News & Observer company to the McClatchy newspaper chain, Nando and the online News & Observer became separate operations and Nando editors moved into a separate building. Seth Effron became Nando's executive editor, Zonker Harris was the managing editor, Mike Emmett, who had a long career as a writer and editor with several of the U.S.'s largest dailies, was the sports editor, while Bruce Siceloff headed the NewsObserver.com staff. Michael Carmean, who had headed the copydesk staff, departed. Other early Nando personnel included Charles S. Powell (the "Evangelist"), Beth Ames, Fraser Van Asch, Gene Wang, Kirk House, Ari Spanos, Alfred Filler, Denise Long, Joe Sterling, Joyce Garcia, Dawn Harris and Sam Barnes. Barnes sometimes worked from the office of the N&O-owned Chapel Hill News, inspiring Bob Stepno, a Nando part-timer and University of North Carolina
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill is a public research university located in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, United States...
journalism doctoral student, to move his weekend morning shift there. In 2000, Schlukbier and Total Sports parted ways. Also leaving were Emmett and Harris, who both went to Miami to work for Terra.com, the world's largest Hispanic Web site. Emmett moved onto to Time Warner/CNN as managing editor of NASCAR.com, then Greenville Online as assistant editor and finally, before retiring, Media General's Western Carolina Regional Manager. Harris continues to work for the Daniels family and is based in Cary, N.C.
Services Nando provided in 1994:
- Classifieds
- International News
- National News
- Regional and Local News
- Sports
- Business
- Lifestyle
- Interactive Websites for Valentine's Day and most major holidays.
- Games, including Mutants and Hangman.
- Chats
- ISP service including the first “Nando Doctor,” Kirk House. House made "House calls" to help users setup the dial-up service.
- Help Desk
- NIE ("Newspapers In Education") programs- NandOLand, free access to the internet for schools
After the McClatchy merger, Nando New Media evolved into McClatchy New Media, with the output of the Nando newsroom channelled to the "24 Hour News" section of all McClatchy newspapers' websites.
News content
The Nando Times employed a round-the-clock crew of news editors, who reprocessed almost all of the News & Observer's incoming wire service feeds -- Associated PressAssociated Press
The Associated Press is an American news agency. The AP is a cooperative owned by its contributing newspapers, radio and television stations in the United States, which both contribute stories to the AP and use material written by its staff journalists...
, Reuters
Reuters
Reuters is a news agency headquartered in New York City. Until 2008 the Reuters news agency formed part of a British independent company, Reuters Group plc, which was also a provider of financial market data...
, Agence France-Presse
Agence France-Presse
Agence France-Presse is a French news agency, the oldest one in the world, and one of the three largest with Associated Press and Reuters. It is also the largest French news agency. Currently, its CEO is Emmanuel Hoog and its news director Philippe Massonnet...
, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times
Los Angeles Times
The Los Angeles Times is a daily newspaper published in Los Angeles, California, since 1881. It was the second-largest metropolitan newspaper in circulation in the United States in 2008 and the fourth most widely distributed newspaper in the country....
, Scripps-Howard, Bloomberg
Bloomberg L.P.
Bloomberg L.P. is an American privately held financial software, media, and data company. Bloomberg makes up one third of the $16 billion global financial data market with estimated revenue of $6.9 billion. Bloomberg L.P...
and more—a year or before most of those news organizations created their own Web sites, and apparently before the wire services recognized an "online edition" as something separate from the printed newspaper. AP and Nando soon became allies in developing the model of how newspapers would use wire services.
Nando editors selected stories, wrote fresh headlines and sorted the wire service stories into news category pages—National, World, Political, Sports, Business etc. Nando's editors sometimes created "combined wires" stories or rewrote story leads. The Nando Times briefly experimented with original news reporting, including sports and election coverage, but became almost exclusively an aggregator and enhancer of news from traditional news services.
Nando excelled at posting "topic" pages carrying dozens of links for developing stories, such as the April, 1995, Oklahoma City bombing
Oklahoma City bombing
The Oklahoma City bombing was a terrorist bomb attack on the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in downtown Oklahoma City on April 19, 1995. It was the most destructive act of terrorism on American soil until the September 11, 2001 attacks. The Oklahoma blast claimed 168 lives, including 19...
http://www.ajr.org/article.asp?id=2006 and the death of Diana, Princess of Wales
Diana, Princess of Wales
Diana, Princess of Wales was the first wife of Charles, Prince of Wales, whom she married on 29 July 1981, and an international charity and fundraising figure, as well as a preeminent celebrity of the late 20th century...
http://www.nandotimes.com/nt/images/diana/. (The Diana memorial pages, hundreds of headlines and pictures from Aug. 31 through Sept. 26, 1997, were among the last documents left on the Nando site in March 2005, although the linked headline stories had expired from the server.)
Hot Java
Nando Times experimented with JavaJava (programming language)
Java is a programming language originally developed by James Gosling at Sun Microsystems and released in 1995 as a core component of Sun Microsystems' Java platform. The language derives much of its syntax from C and C++ but has a simpler object model and fewer low-level facilities...
programming early, creating a Java-powered rotation of news photos on its home page in 1996, linked to photo gallery pages.
Behind the scenes, the most lasting demonstration of Nando Media's Java programming was its Digital Work Bench content management system. The Java-based CMS was written from the ground up starting in 1999 by the company's development team, becoming the default publishing system for the Nando Times. It was later adopted by several McClatchy properties and was eventually re-written entirely in Perl
Perl
Perl is a high-level, general-purpose, interpreted, dynamic programming language. Perl was originally developed by Larry Wall in 1987 as a general-purpose Unix scripting language to make report processing easier. Since then, it has undergone many changes and revisions and become widely popular...
.
McClatchy buys Nando
The Nando "brand" became known quickly and was credited with enhancing the value of the News & Observer corporation, which the Daniels family sold in 1995 to the California-based McClatchyMcClatchy
-Surname:* Carlos K. McClatchy, president of The McClatchy Company; grandson of Charles Kenny McClatchy* Charles Kenny McClatchy , editor of the Sacramento Bee and founder of The McClatchy Company...
newspaper chain http://www.mcclatchy.com/about/. (The News & Observer's 1995 efforts also had included a computer-assisted investigation of the North Carolina hog industry http://www.pulitzer.org/year/1996/public-service/works/about.html, which won it the 1996 Pulitzer Prize
Pulitzer Prize
The Pulitzer Prize is a U.S. award for achievements in newspaper and online journalism, literature and musical composition. It was established by American publisher Joseph Pulitzer and is administered by Columbia University in New York City...
for public service.)
Toward the end
After the sale, McClatchy abandoned Nando's dial-up ISP business (sold to MindSpringMindSpring
MindSpring Enterprise was a major Internet service provider headquartered in Midtown Atlanta, Georgia. Mindspring merged with EarthLink on February 4, 2000, with the company retaining the EarthLink name...
, now part of EarthLink
EarthLink
EarthLink , is an Internet service provider headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia, USA. It claims 1.94 million subscribers.- Business :EarthLink provides a variety of Internet connection types, including dial-up, DSL, satellite, and cable. Both dial-up and high speed Internet access are available...
) and cut back its exploration of original news coverage, which had included the 1996 election campaign http://archives.cjr.org/year/96/1/trail.asp. McClatchy shifted the focus of "Nando New Media" to serve its newspapers and other clients, while Frank Daniels III and other early Nando executives left to create Internet startups focused on community news (Koz
Koz
Koz is the name of:*Cüneyt Köz, Turkish footballer*Dave Koz, American saxophonist*Rich Koz, American actor and broadcasterKOZ is an abbreviation of...
) and sports (Total Sports).
With Nando's changing role, The News & Observer established an interactive media division in 1997, led by Mark Choate. The new division produced newsobserver.com, an online newspaper publishing local news and advertising, as a complement to the national and international news published by Nando. Under Choate's direction, newsobserver.com quickly became one of the leading local newspaper web sites in the country. By 2001, The Media Audit ranked newsobserver.com third in the nation in terms of local market penetration for online newspapers, trailing washingtonpost.com and austin360.com. In that same year, Editor & Publisher awarded newsobserver.com with an EPpy, naming it the best online newspaper service in its circulation category.
The Nando Times pages were discontinued May 27, 2003, replaced with a "Dear readers" page of explanation, with a directory of McClatchy papers' individual sites where the former Nando Times content could be found. The editorial staff continued to process wire stories, which fed the "24 hour news" http://www.sacbee.com/24hour/ sections of other McClatchy properties, such as NewsObserver http://newsobserver.com and SacBee http://sacbee.com.
The Nando brand was abandoned by the McClatchy Company on March 3, 2005 in favor of the name McClatchy Interactive.
External links
- The McClatchy Company http://www.mcclatchy.com/
- Archived Nando pages from 1996-2006 http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.nando.net