THE FIRST ONLINE NEWS AGENCY IN THE WORLD
In 1987 I was back in the U.S., living across from San Francisco in downtown Oakland, which was then the murder capital of America. Since it was predominantly Black, I had no trouble blending in and in fact found life hilarious. I was told by a friend that someone in neighboring Berkeley was looking to hire a writer for some mysterious journalistic venture. I went to a cafe up there, met with a very pleasant young man of about my age and gave him some English versions of feature-length pieces I’d published in European magazines. A couple of days later, we met again and he took me up to a nice big office on the corner of Telegraph Avenue – famous for the cafes, bookstores and riots of my childhood. The backmost room of the office was filled with machinery. In the front room he showed me what he announced was to be my nice big desk. On the desk was a nice big thing like a mechanical dog, or a garbage disposal. “What’s that?” I asked. He said: “That’s your computer”. Under the name The Berkeley Telegraph we created the first internet news agency in the world.
Bandwidth was negligible at the time, email was in its first real year of growth, the University of Illinois’ PLATO system was connected to some 100 other universities, providing its newsletter along with other community functions, and a collaboration with Compuserve and Associated Press brought one newspaper –The Columbus Dispatch– online from 1980 to 1982. Everyone else we were years ahead of; Berners-Lee published the first World Wide Web site on the first web server online at the CERN laboratory in Switzerland in 1991. Reuters only began to offer its service online in the 1990s.
The hero of this venture was Dan Coltrin. the owner/publisher/inventor and computer programmer whom I’d met in that café on Telegraph Avenue. I had no sense of the technological or historical importance of the enterprise, being fully consumed by the manhunter’s ardors of investigative journalism, but, by dint of being the first hire, stood as editor-in-chief and head writer. We soon recruited some other part-time writers and one full-time one -a Polish PhD student from the University of Berkeley. I set the policy -and, most importantly, the tone- of The Berkeley Telegraph, connecting information in single articles in a way that no other journals or journalists bothered to do, and Taddeus and I, with numerous languages and inside information between us, divided up our main beats and would each write up to 14 long feature articles every day, adding a section of “key words” that Dan taught us to include for his searchable index programming. We operated from 1987 to 1988. An enormous archive was built up and we had fun getting clients until Dan was no longer able to convince his funders that the future was literally at our fingertips.
Below is a scan of what might be the only surviving original printout of one of those days’ articles. The horizontal green bands on the printout paper have faded, but the perforations are proof to my eyes of those machine-gun days when the past was the future. Although my beat covered half the world, one of my daily specialties was covering the Iran-Contra scandal since we started. Here’s is a single example.
