The Wildcat Online--breaking boundaries

He focused his bloodshot eyes at the computer screen and gauged how much work he had accomplished in three uninterrupted hours.

Not much.

He looked at his watch; it was 3 a.m..

He expected to be finished by this time, but sleep would have to wait 10 more hours.

Keith Diehl, the first official webmaster for the Arizona Daily Wildcat, realized he "was in for the long haul."

"When I started at the Wildcat, I thought I knew what I was doing," Diehl says. "But I quickly discovered that I was in way over my head."

A soda machine just a few feet away from his computer saved him from nodding off into dreamland.

"Whenever I got tired I would slam a Mountain Dew and get back to work," Diehl remembers.

However, later that morning, he would feel the ill effects of "Doing the Dew."

"My strength vanished as my kidneys failed due to excessive Mountain Dew consumption," Diehl jokes.

Finally, on Jan. 11, 1995, after long hours of working with a slow computer, plagued with hand cramps and heavy eyelids, Diehl launched the official debut of the Wildcat Online.

"The first day I did it, I thought it would take me a couple hours, but it took me 13," Diehl says. "Nothing was automated, and everything had to be done manually, in terms of transferring stories to the site."

Brett Bendickson, then an employee of the Center for Computing and Information Technology and webmaster for the UA online site at the time, helped automate much of the information, reducing the time Diehl spent on the computer by 10 hours. After that, Diehl worked daily from 3 a.m. to 6 a.m. updating the web site for two years.

"I was on a pretty screwed up schedule for a lot of my college life, but it was a good experience," he says.

Having to learn on the job in a new but rapidly growing field of technology turned out to be a valuable experience for Diehl, currently the lead web site designer of the Savannah (Ga.) Morning News. "Print journalism has hundreds of years to draw experience from, but the web is a totally different medium, so all of those boundaries (of print media) don't necessarily apply."

Diehl was not a journalism major, but he was familiar with digital page designing. "I brought a different perspective than the traditional journalism student," says Diehl, who graduated in May 1998 with bachelor's degree in digital arts.

When Diehl was hired in the fall of 1995 to create an online version of the Daily Wildcat, stories were already available on the Internet in text form. He created a site complete with texts, pictures and links.

"I had never been a part of a site that was that large in size; it was quite an undertaking," Diehl says.

Before Christine (Verges) Gacharna became editor in chief of the Daily Wildcat in the spring of 1995, she explored the idea of an online complement to the campus newspaper.

"I wanted to do everything that any other campus newspaper out there might be doing, but I wanted to do it all better."

Gacharna pushed for an online version that went beyond simply putting the newspaper edition on a computer screen. She says that would have been "the equivalent of putting a black and white photograph from the 1920s on television."

Gacharna and her staff met with Bob Cauthorn, who had been the Wildcat editor in chief in the summer and fall of 1983. Together, they developed ideas for "Wildline," the proposed title of the site.

In 1994, Cauthorn had launched StarNet, the Arizona Daily Star's online version and also a local internet service provider.

As the director of new technology at the Arizona Daily Star, Cauthorn manages StarNet, the first online media company in the world to have become profitable. Today, about 32,000 individuals view the web site everyday.

Cauthorn advised Gacharna and her staff to use Wildline as a "way to give students a voice again-which was the whole point of a student newspaper in the first place."

In addition to links and an archive of the Wildcat, "I wanted our site to pulsate with student voice in addition to the news, and I wanted to reach alumni," Gacharna says. "I wanted it to be undoubtedly the best campus newspaper online."

"A lot of big-time publications didn't have a web page when we started up," Diehl says. "I've got to give kudos to Christine for having the foresight to start the web site."

With a large UA population connected to the Internet, Cauthorn said he believes that the Wildcat going online was only natural.

Early on, the web site faced challenges that reflected problems at other news-related sites. Funding a large web site can be difficult, especially when advertisers are looking for sites with large audiences, Cauthorn says.

The Daily Wildcat initially provided the resources and funds for the site to make up for low advertising revenue, Gacharna says. She added the webmaster position to her editorial staff, paying $28 per issue, which came out of the newsroom budget. The newspaper's computers and programs were used to establish and maintain the web site.

This semester, the site boasts a brand new design featuring the italicized phrase, "Celebrating 100 years of student media," running under the title banner. Previews to the day's top stories from the Daily Wildcat fill the page, while permanent links immersed in Wildcat blue lead the viewer to different sections also found in the newspaper.

New this semester is the "Food Court," which allows viewers to be one click away from the menus of restaurants near campus.

Since 1995, the Wildcat Online's audience has grown considerably. Bryan D. Hance, who has been involved with the web site since 1995, estimates that about 8,000 people a week visited the site during its first year. Today the number has increased to 17,000 visitors a week.

Most of the visitors tend to be alumni or UA sports fans. "Football and basketball news are a big attraction to the site," says Hance, who graduated in the winter of 1998 with a bachelor's in journalism. Currently, he is studying to earn a bachelor's degree in computer science.

As the systems analyst for Arizona Student Media, Hance provides computer support for the newspaper, KAMP Radio and Campus TV 3.

Getting online advertising was difficult in the beginning, but the growth of the Internet has helped the Wildcat Online attract advertisers in recent years. "Advertisers began to realize that there was a huge college market, and they started to invest a lot more," Hance says. "All of the sudden, we had all of these advertisers willing to pay for ads on our site."

The Wildcat Online began to generate a profit two years ago, and today it is completely self-sufficient. Banner and classified ads are the two main sources of income. The "Food Court" adds revenue as restaurant owners post their menus for an additional charge.

Today, problems with maintaining the web site are primarily in manpower.

"We are really having a hard time finding (qualified) people; we just wish we could get more journalism students that were really into the Internet," Hance says.

At StarNet, Cauthorn also finds that new staff members for his online site often need training.

"I think any journalist who graduates from journalism school now without some new media credentials is making a grave mistake because that's where all the job growth is occurring," says Cauthorn, who has 60 people on his online staff.

Last summer, Jesse Stengel, a sophomore studying computer science, took over as webmaster of the Wildcat Online. He finds the job a little easier than it was during Diehl's years. "Generally things run smoothly," Stengel remarks cooly. He updates the site daily, beginning at 5 a.m. and finishing at 8 a.m.

Gacharna, who now lives in Tokyo but will move to Seattle next year, still looks at the web site from time to time. "This latest redesign is my favorite-professional, credible, one-click away from what I want," she raves. "Today's Wildcat Online has achieved and perhaps exceeded everything that I once dreamed it to be."