Just passing and I thought I might just drop in, say hi and give you a bit of history…as I remember it…about MediaSpy.org.
The idea started in about 1998 with Pete(Lepatron ) and myself (Jezza). We both had very basic, you can almost call fanboy sites about various news presenters. We were using free hosting sites so the sites were very basic, We then began combining our sites under various names until about 2000 we thought lets do something serious and do a critique of all things relating to the media. We discussed a few domain names and eventually settled on mediaspy.org. The Captain…hi Bacco would remember some things about the early day.
I think it was around 2001 that we became mainline and started paying for our own hosting. But we had no idea of the monster we were creating. We moved from startup to shared to business and corporate packages…eventually we ran our own servers. WE just kept growing. At one stage it was costing us almost 10 grand a year but we resisted paid subscriptions or advertisements because we wanted the site to be free.
Sadly about 7 years ago I had to walk away for my own sanity. My original partner. Lepa had left as had most of the long term administrators. What a lot of people didn’t see was what was happening behind the scenes…a serious of threatening laws suites . Some big ones like the Hey Dad story. One of our reporters can been conned by an imposter and published a story that wasn’t true. It was posted just after midnight and I pulled it as soon as I saw it around 2am…but the damage was done. The next morning the story had been spread across a major radio network early that morning quoting us. The lawyers as you can imagine had a field day. Had to tip toe around that one.
It was a great ride but this broken down old Vietnam veteran needed a break. Thanks to the Captain and the rest of the staff, mediaspy.org seems to be still going strong…and I have a smile on my face.
I may just hang around for a while…as a mere shitkicker of course…and tell stories of the old days.