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On January 22, 1996, The New York Times announced the public availability of the website in an article hidden on page D7.
An article by Peter H. Lewis states, “The New York Times today began publishing daily on the World Wide Web, giving readers around the world instant access to much of the daily newspaper's content.'' ” is stated. “The electronic newspaper (address: http://www.nytimes.com) is part of the Times' strategy to expand its readership.”
Mr. Lewis once owned that URL.
In 1985, Times editors AM Rosenthal and Arthur Gelb assembled a task force, including Mr. Lewis, to work on a project called The New York Times in 2000. Lewis shared details of the project and his thoughts this week. Time works by email, and most of this explanation comes from email.
Lewis, who was editor of the science section and computer columnist at the time, recalled predicting that by 2000, Times articles would be read on computer screens in cyberspace.
“I remember Artie waving his hand and dismissing me,” Lewis wrote of Gelb.
A few years later, editor Bill Stockton, who Mr. Lewis said was a champion of science and technology coverage, assigned Mr. Lewis to cover “the rise of the Internet.”
At one point, “I asked the Times for permission to register a web domain and was told no,” Lewis wrote in an email. “Some of us thought that was short-sighted.”
Another reporter, John Markoff, who joined the Times in 1988 to cover computer networking, signed up for nyt.com some time after starting that assignment. (He was using it for email; he didn't have a web page set up on that domain, so when people tried to access it they got an error warning.) And Lewis He scooped nytimes.com in late 1993 or early 1994.
In mid-1995, Mr. Lewis received a phone call from Gordon Thompson, the Times' director of Internet services, who told him that the newspaper wanted to go online as the “New York Times of cyberspace” and needed the nytimes.com domain he had won. There is an internal debate surrounding the short nyt.com URL that Markov registered. (Mr. Markoff explains that the Times thought the three-letter URL would be confused with the New York telephone's Internet address.)
Markoff said in an email Friday that he had registered the nyt.com domain before any registration fees were incurred. However, Mr. Lewis paid a $35 fee to nytimes.com. Lewis said he would be happy to transfer the domain as long as he received a refund. He transferred ownership of the URL to the Times, which launched the website from the Hippodrome office building in Manhattan on January 19, 1996.
A few days later, the website was published to the world. Lewis covered the event for newspapers but was not involved in the launch.
As Markoff wrote in 2017, he eventually gave away nyt.com on the condition that he kept the email markoff@nyt.com, which he continued to do until 2016. And both URLs now send readers to the Times' headquarters. page.
But there's one problem. Lewis said he never received his $35 refund.
we are working on it.
