In 1995, we established this Internet version of The Abilene Reporter-News, which is the oldest continuous business in Abilene, Texas ... established only months after the town in 1881.The online version of the newspaper - Reporternews.com - makes its way to people all over the world. And we have a lot of other content on the site as well, including one of the most comprehensive Dallas Cowboys sites online, GOfridaynight.com, and much more. We're even home to Memoriams.net, an online memorial venture.

But we're more than that. Even though we repurpose a significant amount of print content online, we also have Texas-wide and nation-wide content online that isn't in the local newspaper. We "separate out" content so you don't have to. With everything from sports to religion to politics, we want to provide you a user-friendly way to get your information. It's much cheaper, of course, to place content online than on paper, and we're dedicated to making that online content easy to find through a well-organized site (see our site index), and a search engine that meets your needs ... as well as a page where you can easily search the web.

We're not going to duplicate a printed newspaper on your monitor, as do some sites. You find your information differently in a printed newspaper than you do online, and we want to be organized in such a way that you can find that news and information as easily with your computer as you can by thumbing through the various sections of a printed newspaper. Both versions have merit, and we honestly believe you shouldn't be without either one. And, just so you know, we don't put the entire content of our printed newspaper online. That's one reason the Internet version remains free! And, of course, we want to keep circulation of the print product healthy. So, why not subscribe to our printed newspaper now and get everything!?

We also believe in interactivity. People are flocking to the Internet for chatrooms and other interactivity as well as a variety of content. We also want to make it easy for you to not only give our online product feedback but our print product as well. Such links for sending a letter, giving feedback, asking for help, etc., are scattered throughout our site.

The Beginning: How We Got Here

In the late fall of 1994, about a year after the browser Mosaic appeared and signaled that a new and exciting Information Super Highway was indeed being constructed, former Abilene Reporter-News publisher Frank Puckett (retired July 31, 2000) returned from a meeting talking about the Internet and something called "the worldwide web." That seems like a Millennium ago.

Puckett didn't know if The Web was just a fad or The Next Great Thing, but he recognized the importance of the "level-playing field" it brought to the information-disseminating business, and he wanted to make sure the Abilene Reporter-News stayed out front ... "protecting the franchise but also looking to the future."

In late January 1995, James Langford of the Abilene Christian University Center for Teaching Excellence showed self-described "computer-illiterate managing editor" Danny Reagan how to code HTML with the help of BBEdit Lite and a shareware program called Fetch. With that hour of training, the purchase of a handy "My Little Mac" book and a small Powerbook 150, the online newspaper launched quietly into "space" on the first Monday afternoon in February 1995. ACU graciously hosted the initial content on its LAN server.

Being in on the beginning of a "history" was exciting for several people at the newspaper, especially the editor at the time, Glenn Dromgoole, who had to give up a lot of his managing editor's time. He, too, saw the promise of the new media and gave his full blessing to the project.

At first, Reporter OnLine received a couple of hundred hits a week, but during vacations and holidays, births and illnesses, server crashes and drained batteries, the site was continually updated for those few eyeballs that saw us ... thanks to that little Powerbook and the nearest phone line.

In the spring of 1995, we transferred our content to a commercial host-server and expanded operations. During our history, we've made a total of seven migrations of content to larger and larger servers: from the ACU server to Abilene Online's commercial server; to a shared server in Corpus Christi; to a bigger Corpus server; to Internet America; to E.W. Scripps' Cincinnati headquarters; and finally to E.W. Scripps-Knoxville, where our content resides today on a beefy cluster of redundant DEC Alphas.

We were the third newspaper in Texas to have presence on the Web - behind the Austin American-Statesman's full-blown site and a Dallas Morning News opinion page - and only the second to offer news updated daily. Although it's hard to find the actual "rank," we were among the first 100 or so newspapers to go online. Today, that total worldwide is well over 2,000.

In the fall of 1995, Reagan filled a niche on the Web by creating a series of Dallas Cowboys pages on our site. There were only a smattering of fan offerings on the web at the time ... no news sites. Gradually we began adding more content and more timely updates and interactivity, and we soon had the most complete Dallas Cowboys site on the web. Scores of people who joined our virtual community of chatters at that time are still with us today, more than six years later.

In the spring of 1996, we registered the domain name texnews.com (we were thinking "big" even then) and began sharing a Web server with our sister paper in Corpus Christi - The Caller-Times.

By the summer of 1996, when the infamous Michael Irvin trial began in Dallas and we covered it online as breaking news, we were setting traffic records daily. In just a matter of months we had gone from receiving 30,000 hits a month to well over 35,000 hits a DAY. Although the Dallas Cowboys directory garners about 50 percent of our traffic, the rest of ReporterNews.Com enjoys continuing growth as a result. As we entered the third quarter of year 2000, the site was receiving well over TWO MILLION page views -- not hits -- a month.

In the closing days of 2002, we switched from a "static" HTML site to a dynamically-created, database-driven site created by Scripps Technology and the Vignette corporation -- offering you many new features and us the opportunity to concentrate on outstanding Web journalism, rather than coding and uploading.

Where We're Going

We're constantly working on re-designing our web site. And we'll keep placing additional content on the site as well as updating the look, feel and functionality of it. Marketing solutions for our advertisers are a reality now, as well as "vertical" solutions (such as BigCountryJobs.com and BigCountryCars.com) that will help our advertisers sell their products quicker and offer our online users more and more value and convenience to their "wired time."

We receive anywhere from 100,000 to 200,000 page accesses on the ReporterNews.Com family of web sites each DAY. The number of users just keeps growing. We receive close to TWO MILLION page views a month now. That translates to between 11,000 and 16,000 unique visitors a day.

We will continue to strive - as our positioning statement proclaims - to be "Your Place in Space." And that goes doubly for those Internet users who are trying to find news and information about the state of Texas. This will be where they come to find that information...and where sponsors place their banners to sell their products or services to those people.

We now have more than 100,000 pages of content that are keyword searchable, and we add scores more each day.

Judging by the traffic in our numerous chatrooms and the numerous e-mail messages we receive almost each day commenting on our site, the demographics of our site must follow fairly closely the ever-changing demographics of the Web. More and more women are visiting us, and even though more men may visit our Dallas Cowboys directory, we're sure that all ages of both sexes visit us regularly.

We have been used on more than one occasion by universities as a reference site, and considering the variety of educational domains that register on our server logs, a large segment of college students frequent us for one reason or another.

We do not put all the content of the printed newspaper online as of yet, but we include most of the local news and information, plus hundreds of additional stories on Texas news and sports each week. We want people from all over the world to know that they can come to our site for Abilene and area news and information, and to find out what's happening in Texas.

We are never content with our look or satisfied with the amount of information we provide. We want to enhance both our visual presence and wealth of content for our Internet users and for our local, regional and national advertisers who want to reach a large audience.

Since the beginning, we've wanted to become THE Texas site on the Internet. We feel alliances with our E.W. Scripps sister papers, our re-integration into the ARN newsroom, introduction of our dynamically-created site, and aggressive pursuit of new technology will help us reach that goal.