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To mark 10 years of online journalism in the UK, Colin Meek asks key people in the industry to identify pivotal moments in the development of internet news.

Ask most journalists to guess where the first online source of national news was published and they might stab at New York, Seattle or perhaps San Francisco. Some might guess Los Angeles or London. In fact, the answer is Galway in Ireland. In 1987 Liam Ferrie, a Digital Equipment Corporation employee based in the town, used DECNET to send out a weekly summary of Irish news to colleagues in the US.

Back then Mr Ferrie didn't realise that he was the cutting edge of journalism, but 17 years on his newsletter still survives in the form of Emigrant Online - a hugely successful news site aimed at Irish expatriates.

"We think we are the oldest internet-based news service that still survives," says Liam Ferrie, publisher and director of Irish Emigrant Publications. Digital closed in Galway in 1993 but Liam Ferrie's newsletter had built such a large following that he decided to work on it full time. Two years later, just a year after the launch of Electronic Telegraph, the publication had its own site at emigrant.ie. The site now carries six publications with a combined subscription of 80,000. The website records 125,000 user sessions each month.

Emigrant Online has survived the initial dot.com gold rush, the later dot.com slump and the years since. So what’s the secret? "We tend to be more personal than other news providers," Ferrie told dotJournalism. "We are informal and we don’t always write in the third person." Emigrant Online now employs six full-time journalists, freelancers and has an office in Boston.

Mr Ferrie agrees that Emigrant Online could never survive without the internet because the internet is the only way some markets can be reached. Mike Ward is head of the department of journalism at University of Central Lancashire. He puts it this way: "News used to be defined largely by geography. But now news can be defined by a community of interest. Emigrant Online falls into both camps."

Milverton Wallace is founder of the NetMedia conference and associate at the Centre for Information Behaviour and the Evaluation of Research. He identifies three sites that cater for a 'community of interest' in a way inconceivable in print form: NTK 'for its irreverence and trouble-making'; Slashdot 'for unmatched tech reporting'; and Internet Scout Project for developments in online teaching.

Over the last decade sites like these, and many others, have seized the advantages of the internet to carve out whole new markets. There are, according to Mr Ward and Mr Wallace, some examples where mainstream media has exploited the new media potential. Electronic Telegraph was years ahead of other mainstream publishers in the UK and Mr Ward and Mr Wallace both identify GuardianUnlimited and BBC Online as being at the cutting edge with BBC 'pre-eminent' in Mr Ward's view. Mr Wallace identifies the award winning piece title the 'Malaria Business' published by Swissinfo and Swiss Radio International as a groundbreaking example of online journalism.

For Richard Burton, current editor of telegraph.co.uk, one landmark stands out in the development of mainstream online. "The 11 September attacks in 2001 were a fantastic challenge when internet journalism entered a new era," he told dotJournalism. At the tip of the surge in traffic telegraph.co.uk was successfully coping with 600 requests per second. "That made it the defining moment in my view. There are so many people working in front of computers it is what they use to get news." According to Mr Burton, other world events underline the service that only new media can provide. For example, when the Starr report into Clinton was published, people turned to online news for the report and the context.

Even so, much of the mainstream media has struggled to come to terms with the technology. Wallace has argued that "most websites merely put digital analogues of their traditional content online. They create silicon newsprint and try to pass it off as new media". In 2001, Daily Mail chief executive Charles Sinclair told the UK’s culture, media and sport select committee that he didn’t think the internet was the place for breaking news. "We have no belief that newspapers will transfer themselves onto the internet," he said. But, according to Mr Wallace, the failure of most newspapers in particular to adapt quickly to the internet is not down to a failure to adopt technology. Instead, "it is a failure to appreciate that readers have moved on." He adds: "Regional and national newspaper circulation has been declining for the past 20 years. For whatever reason (lifestyle or demographic changes and political disengagement, for example) the newspaper industry is simply not satisfying consumers, particularly the young, as they did in the past".

Consumers, especially younger consumers, now have a multiplicity of information sources he says. "Moreover, easy-to-use web publishing tools, broadband connection and cheap mobile devices have given people in the western world the ability to create their own media spaces". As a result, he says, people are no longer content to be passive consumers of mainstream media output. Hence the popularity of weblogs and weblogging.

"Journalists are no longer the sole providers of news," says Mr Ward, and one of the most important side effects of the internet will be how online journalists respond to that he says.

So, is the future of online publishing in the hands of the weblogger as some of the hype would have us believe? "We are at the birth of a new media," says Mr Ward. "People get excited and every step this toddler is taking is scrutinsed and declared rubbish or awesome. Weblogs come along and you get some people saying this is the future of journalism."

According to Mr Wallace weblogs are important because they enable the former audience to talk back to editors and journalists he adds: "The problem is that the bloggerati is itself an elite. To produce a decent blog (or its close relative, the wiki) requires a level of technical skills most ordinary folk do not possess. Personal blogs could become a kind of home-base for everyone - a place to receive and send voice and text messages, share pictures, manage projects and so on. For blogging to be as ubiquitous as emailing, the software must achieve the same ease of use as most email clients."

Mr Ward agrees with this interpretation. He reckons the social mix of bloggers is probably identical to that of journalists. "So are we really getting a different take on the news if that is the case?" he asks.

Even so, Mr Wallace lists weblogs alongside RSS, news aggregators and SMS as one of the four most important groundbreaking developments of online journalism over the past decade.

According to Mr Ward the next 10 years will be as unpredictable as the first decade. But a key issue will be how journalists respond to the ways non-journalists use the internet to express themselves. In a recent lecture Mr Wallace put it like this: "What's new and threatening to the professional journalist is that our readers and audience now have the ability to get their stories to a global audience quicker than you can – and they don't need anyone’s permission to do it! Your readers and viewers have become your competitors. The great American tech reporter Dan Gillmor assessed the situation and concluded that journalism must evolve away from its lecture mode to include a conversation with its audience."

More news from dotJournalism:
Q&A: Richard Burton, web editor of Telegraph.co.uk
Multimedia future for BBC
Customisation is the future of news
Blogging: the new journalism?

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