The Story of New Zealand's Internet

Transcription

Alastair Thompson – General Manager/Co-Founder, Scoop.co.nz

“The origins of Scoop really date back to 1997 and a different website at the time called Newsroom. It was set up by several of the founders of Scoop plus another person. The origin was basically a conversation with a friend about the fact that we wanted to set up a news website that was the beginning days of the Internet – the World Wide Web had only been around for maybe a couple of years by that stage and Netscape had just been invented and so forth. I’d been working in the press gallery for the previous five or six years. In the press gallery there’s the in-tray of press releases and speeches of ministers etc that come through every day. Typically I was working for NBR and we’d basically ignore it. There would be this vast quantity of information coming across which occasionally we’d glance at and then pursue the actual stories. But it was quite obvious that this information is useful to some people and worth digitising. So basically we set up the site with the objective of just digitising what was going across the desks of the Press Gallery and from there we moved to digitising all press content.”