Since that time, everything about The New York Times website has become faster, sleeker, more organized and much more informative, according to both men. Indeed, with each press of the publish button, web production began moving at a quicker pace, though the overall acceptance of web personnel across the newsroom was not nearly as rapid. Owles, now a senior staff editor in business, pointed to the 2000 Presidential Election as “the event that forced the integration to happen on a much quicker scale. Owles, like Mr. Piepenburg, was one of about 10 overnight producers, working the midnight to 8 a.m. shift and making sure that everything that appeared in the paper during the day had been transferred to the website the next morning, a process that was often slow and cumbersome. “To be honest, we were considered a nuisance it was always print first and digital last.”Įric Owles, who was a member of that first web group that the Times hired in ’97, said web producers and the like “had a hard time getting to the table in those days.”Īt the time, Mr. “I have memories of calling over to the print side and having people say to me ‘Who is this?' One editor even hung up on me.” he said. Piepenburg, now a senior staff editor in the Culture section of The Times.
“Back then, most people really didn’t understand how print and the website were integrated,” said Mr. The Guild also recognized a critical new shift in the industry. This successful organizing effort meant that, though the age of digital journalism had barely begun, the Guild understood the value and necessity of protecting these journalists. (The E.M.C., which originally operated in a different building, at 1120 Sixth Ave., was formed a year earlier).
That understanding, which was reached by The Newspaper Guild of New York and the New York Times Company in August 1997, marked the first digital news organization to be unionized in the country. While that sounds a lot like “The X-Files,” it is in the Guild’s files where a search for the arrival of the first wave of website personnel turned up a memorandum of understanding regarding what was then known as The New York Times’s Electronic Media Corporation. Suddenly enveloped in a digital atmosphere at The New York Times, “The Print People built a wall between themselves and the Web People,” said Erik Piepenburg, an overnight producer with the website staff in those early years. Twenty years ago in a Times Square building not so far away, “Web People” invaded a newspaper world long-inhabited by “Print People.”
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