The Irish Times is a media company with a long history. To get a sense of this reflect on the fact that it was already half a century old when one of its printing presses was burnt down during the 1916 Rising, when the rebels used its massive rolls of newsprint as barricades. In 1994, the same year that the Mosaic/Netscape browser first began to bring PC users to the Web, The Irish Times launched a digital edition in 1994. It was among the very first papers to do so. And like many media organisations, The Irish Times participated in and suffered from the dot com bubble. The Irish Times’ Facebook Timeline shows these milestones back to 1859.
The Irish Times is taking the next steps in its development as a media organisation. As small signs of this advance see the announcement today by the online editor of a new uniform commenting system, last’s week debut of a new morning brief using Tumblr, and the gradual enrichment of stories on Irishtimes.com with new embedded content, as this example shows. Tomorrow The Irish Times will announce something novel: The Irish Times Digital Challenge. Continue reading
