This article is part of The Poynter 50, a series reflecting on 50 moments and people that shaped journalism over the past half-century — and continue to influence its future. As Poynter celebrates its 50th anniversary, we examine how the media landscape has evolved and what it means for the next era of news.

The discussions were spirited, at best. There were no shouting matches in a conference room full of hefty salaries and nice suits. No impassioned speeches from haggard, plucky editors given on the newsroom floor. One moment, though, remains lodged in Donna Lovell’s memory. A copy editor at the San Jose Mercury News, Lovell had volunteered to work on Mercury Center, the paper’s online component.

Then, Chris Jennewein made the announcement.

“We’re going to experiment with something called the World Wide Web. It’s only going to take 15 minutes of your day.”

Lovell began learning HTML. Until then, the Mercury News’ content was only available to AOL subscribers — many of whom were logging on with those ubiquitous 10-hour trial CDs.

Mercury Center would change that. The Mercury News would become widely regarded as the first newspaper to put its entire content online, initially for free.

The decision established a lasting expectation that online news should be free. The internet grew and grew into a daily fixture of unfathomable, unpredictable influence that to this day challenges the industry’s ability to build sustainable models for reader revenue. It is a crisis without end.

But in the mid-1990s? Optimism ran high. The regrets came later.

Groping for the future

Mercury Center was an experiment.

It was not intended to replace the actual paper, Bob Ingle, the late executive editor, said in the Mercury News’ May 9, 1993, story introducing his baby. It was an option in an increasingly technological world.

“We don’t know how electronic media is going to develop,” Bill Mitchell, director of electronic publishing at Mercury News, said then, “but we want to position ourselves so that when new directions emerge, we can move with them.”

When Mercury Center finally unmoored itself from AOL in early 1995, it was another exciting leap forward. At the time, most online users accessed news through platforms like AOL’s, which required a subscription and limited what users could see. The web meant anyone with an internet connection could visit the site — for free, because, as Jennewein, director of the Knight Ridder New Media Center, recalled, “we couldn’t do anything but make it free.”

Mercury Center started charging readers $4.95 a month in April 1995, three months after the free site’s launch; Mercury News subscribers paid just $2.95. Previously happy readers bristled at paying for something they’d just been getting for free. Then, another reversal: The site dropped the fee in May 1998.

By the time the waffling was done, “we gave away pretty much all of the content, and the subscription was for a premium relationship that really didn’t get you much of anything more,” said Bob Ryan, Mercury News’ deputy managing editor, who later became vice president of content and local operations of Knight Ridder Digital.

Readers weren’t interested, Ryan added, “because there was so much content available for free in those early years.” Free news became an expectation, one that Mercury Center had inadvertently established that other outlets followed.

‘We were in the wrong business’

Reader revenue was just one part — the smallest one — of the newspaper earnings equation. With its free new website, the Mercury News could have maximized reach and monetized with ads — an approach that had worked for the news business before, Jennewein said. It might have worked again in the 1990s, he added, since publishing on the internet cost next to nothing. “So why not eat that cost and base it all on advertising and get the largest possible market?”

But the gap between online and print ad valuations was massive, said Kathy Yates, Mercury News’ general manager and senior vice president. The math didn’t work and the focus was on editorial.

“We weren’t in the right business,” Ryan said. “We weren’t in the business of retaining and amassing a really substantial audience.”

Everybody tried to find an answer. The competition, he realized later, wasn’t “smarter people figuring out how to package content online or even produce better newspaper-type content. It was Google.”

As years passed, readers didn’t flock to a newspaper’s website, Lovell said. They headed over to Google or Facebook.

The old model wasn’t built for a digital world. “The whole idea of a newspaper as an aggregator and creator of original, local content was, and still is, a nonviable business model,” Ryan said.

Nobody knew all that back then. Or maybe they didn’t want to.

In the 1990s, Yates remembered, industry skeptics considered the internet another nemesis print journalism could neutralize, like radio and television before it. She didn’t share that confidence.

The Mercury News and its peers were built on a simple but effective idea, Lovell observed: Bundle a mix of international, national and local news and sell it as a single, digestible product. But to succeed online, thought Bruce Koon, Mercury Center’s managing editor, newspapers would have had to stop being newspapers.

For better or for worse

Over the years, newspapers returned to reader revenue. Metered paywalls, premium subscriptions, donation-based nonprofit models — each promised a solution to the problem Mercury Center had unintentionally accelerated. Some places, like The New York Times and The Boston Globe, found success. But for most local newspapers, asking readers to pay has had little impact. The expectation of free news remains hard to shake, even as more newspapers helplessly wilt and blow away.

Could anything have been done to make Mercury Center more resonant? “I don’t think there’s an answer to that question,” Ryan said. “Has anyone discovered it?”

The experiment has entered its fourth decade.

For years, newspapers were defined by limits — column inches and deadlines. The internet was all possibilities, a way to embrace the 21st century in the 1990s.

So much of what was to come, the innovations and the dilemmas, were reflected in Mercury Center’s brief existence, what Koon now calls “a rough draft of history.” Or as Lovell put it, she and her colleagues were “pioneers of online journalism” — for better or for worse.

“The enthusiasm of the early internet and web was ‘information wants to be free,’ so I suspect many fell under that lure of that siren call,” Koon said over email.

Mercury Center set a precedent. The news industry has yet to recover.