10 years? It feels like a hundred!

Drama in the field
For our staff, there were dramas in the field, though thankfully no casualties:

• Business reporter Martin Wolk was attending a conference at the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001. After evacuating, he filed one of the earliest first-person accounts of the terrorist attacks when he was able to get through to his mother on the phone, had her call the news desk on a second phone and then dictate a story as she held the two phones together.
• With NATO jets bombing Belgrade in April 1999, reporter Preston Mendenhall was arrested and then deported by Serb troops who saw him compiling data for an interactive map of the city and took him for a spy.
• Reporter Kari Huus was in the right place at the right time on two separate occasions: Once when she was on the streets of Jakarta the night that Indonesian President Suharto was overthrown and again when there was a major earthquake in Taiwan.
• Staffers Michael Moran and Frank Barbieri were detained in the Gaza Strip by Palestinian forces who saw them snapping photos. They were released after handing over a blank audiotape that they told their captors was the “film” from their digital camera.

And sometimes the drama came calling:

• A meeting of the World Trade Organization erupted into three days of riots that became known as the “Battle for Seattle” in December 1999. In covering the violence, political reporter Tom Curry and photographer Jennifer Loomis were repeatedly doused by tear gas, including one barrage that caught Curry in the middle of a phone interview.
• A 6.8 magnitude earthquake rocked the Puget Sound area on Feb. 28, 2001, sending reporters and editors in the Redmond newsroom scrambling under their desks. Fortunately, generators kicked in and the site stayed online.
• There were two rounds of layoffs, in September 1997 when 40 people left and in December 2001, when 18 people departed. Staffing levels have grown since then, but at just under 200 employees, MSNBC.com is still below its 1996 high.

When did that happen, again?
Other events raced past so fast that we barely slowed down to take notice:

• The site was redesigned twice, in 1997 and 2003.
• Video came of age, with tens of millions of individual clips watched each month.
• Co-productions with NBC News and MSNBC TV intensified, from "Dateline NBC" asking viewers to become an online jury in 1999 to NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams launching his own blog in 2005.
• Site production extended to Europe, with a team of journalists based in London, and to Asia, with a team of developers located in Shanghai.
• "Artistic differences" continued, as well. During the 2003 redesign, style guidelines were posted in the rest rooms. Insurgents responded with their own publication, the Toilet Terrorista.

And through it all, the tools got better, the business climate improved, the company became profitable, and the news kept us hopping.

So now we arrive at the beginning of our second decade, a more mature organization, battle-tested and well-schooled in agility.

And where will we end up 10 years from now?

“I always refuse to predict more than about six months down the road, because in our business a year is an eternity,” says Managing Editor Jennifer Sizemore. “But I can confidently say that we will continue to be at the forefront of innovation — whether it's new ways to deliver information or new ways to tell stories.

“OK, let me put one out there. Ten years from now? I'm betting the Pulitzer Committee will have awakened and realized it's the 21st century, and be awarding prizes for great journalism — not just great newspapers. I expect we'll have a couple.”

Projects editor Mike Brunker has worked at MSNBC.com since a month after its launch in 1996.

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