After the November 2008 attacks in Mumbai, Mindy McAdams published a short timeline of the events that had shaped online news, 9/11 and the London bombings of 2005 among them. This post added two earlier moments from 1997, both at the BBC, which it argued did as much to establish the web as an accepted platform for news.
The first was the general election of May 1997. The BBC had launched a dedicated Election 1997 site, and on the night of the vote a small team of journalists in a room in West London posted stories and results as they came in. The election ended eighteen years of Conservative government; the site had been due to close afterwards, but it had built enough of an audience that the BBC kept it running while it prepared BBC News Online, which launched in November 1997.
The second came in between: the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, in August 1997. The BBC set up a site to remember her and invited tributes, and received more than 7,500 messages, too many to process and publish. On the day of the funeral a handful of staff covered the event live, writing stories on every aspect of the day and posting images as it unfolded.
It was the first time BBC News had attempted anything of the kind online. The post’s argument was that these two events showed the web’s strength as a platform for breaking news and helped legitimise the internet as a news medium.