On the eve of winter break in 1994, around the time most students have finished exams and are heading home for the holidays, David Hanlin had a quirky little idea.

"How about we get on this world wide web thing," Hanlin, then editor in chief, proposed to fellow managing board members Andrew Csontos and Patrick Riccards.

Talk about an epiphany.

At the time, most students might have said "world wide what?"

It was just seven years ago, but in Internet time, 1994 was like the Paleolithic age—the web was just emerging from the primordial ooze. Surfing the Net was tedious, and the content was hardly worth viewing—most of it was academic or government-oriented, with a few technology-savvy news sites.

But with little knowledge of programming, the Cavalier Daily decided to forge ahead, and beat out a lot of reputable national newspapers in getting on the web.

By the spring of 1995, they were ready to launch. A house advertisement portrayed a giant red spider web spread over a full page of the CD. The only words were: "It’s coming."

The process of birthing a web site was ugly at first—with then-Operations Manager Csontos taking a McGyver-like approach by putting together a web site with some rough programming code, outdated software, a 56K modem and some chewing gum to hold it all together.

"It was a hell of a lot more complicated than it is today," said Csontos, who, not surprisingly, is now a web designer for an Alexandria, Va., company. "It was pretty boring looking… but we knew it had the potential to reach an infinite number of people."

Six years later, the CD online (www.cavalierdaily.com ) has been named one of the best college newspaper web sites in the country.

The paper’s web site had won recognition in the past, but this was the big one—the Online Pacemaker award—which is sort of like the Pulitzers of college journalism. This award is special, current and former editors say, because this was the first time a separate online category had been created by the Associated Collegiate Press.

By winning the 2000 Pacemaker, the Cavalier Daily web site is in the company of not only other highly touted college newspapers like the Daily Tar Heel or the Daily Pennsylvanian, it was running in the company of tech-savvy schools like M.I.T., Stanford and Harvard.

"We felt pretty good about getting the online award because this was the first year they gave it out," said Tom Bednar, who served as editor in chief from 2000 to 2001. "It’s gratifying because we knew we had a great web site, but we wanted validation." 

New Challenges In Staffing
As The Cavalier Daily enters its 112th year as the primary source of news around Grounds, it continues to evolve and change with the times, just as it always has. But with the prominence of the CD Online, change comes quicker these days than it did in the past.

Running a web site for a college newspaper brings with it new challenges on virtually every level—recruiting staff, operational issues, editorial content and finances.

Newspaper web sites can no longer just be a regurgitation of the print edition—they must have what the technology industry calls "value-added" components. These can include large databases, online bulletin boards and links to other resources.

That’s why the CD has built a web staff of nearly 20 students. The webmaster, who oversees the staff, is on the same level as the assistant managing editor—not a member of the Managing Board but a notch above the junior board.

In the staffing area, editors who once looked for a motivated first-year with a passion for writing are now also looking for engineering students who know Java, html and other programming languages.

Interestingly, editors say there has been some cross-pollination between the techie staff and the literary staff. Some members of the web staff have written editorials or opinion pieces, while some reporters are learning the basics of web journalism.

"We’re reaching out to entirely different segment of the school," said current Editor-in- Chief John Clark. "It’s drawing together parts of the school that might not otherwise interact."

Some students are now joining The Cavalier Daily with career goals of being online journalists. And many of on the web staff have come to the CD with professional web design and software experience from summer jobs at technology companies.

"The students have gotten much more sophisticated," Bednar said.

Financially, however, the web site is a drag on the newspaper as a whole.

In the beginning, Csontos—a 1995 graduate who was the CD’s first real webmaster—didn’t see any way to put advertisements online. The truth is, he wasn’t that far off, as advertising-supported web sites have proven to be a disaster from Yahoo! on down to the smallest web sites.

Today, the CD online has some advertising, but not enough to break even. The staff is still trying to find ways to capitalize on the 200,000 hits a month the site receives.

"Just like everyone, we’re trying to figure out a way to make the web site profitable," Clark says. "Right now the print edition subsidizes the web site."

Technologically, the site has gone through many evolutions.

When Csontos launched the site, he had the misfortune of being a fourth-year who should have been enjoying the final three months of CD retirement after the February staff elections. Instead, he found himself rattling around the basement of Newcomb Hall at 2 or 3 in the morning, trying to put the entire print edition up on the web.

In the late 1990s, however, the CD Online began to modernize as a new slate of technology-savvy students began to join the staff. These were students for whom the web had been a reality throughout high school, and they raised the bar.

The newspaper moved its web hosting operation from a local Internet service company to an in-house computer closet, and invested in its own server.

The web staff now includes people who specialize only in hardware, while others focus just on software or graphic design. Posting the editorial content online has become more automated, and the web staff doesn’t need to stay as late as it used to.

Never Far From Controversy
Throughout its history, The Cavalier Daily has often been a lightning rod for controversy around the University.

In the late 1960s, the newspaper changed its tune on the Vietnam War, and editorialized against the war. In the late 1970s, the University attempted to set up an advisory board to oversee operations at the fiercely independent daily. The subsequent protests and the CD’s refusal to cave-in are now part of Cavalier Daily lore. In the early 1990s, The Cavalier Daily was stung by a string of racially tinged controversies over an editorial cartoon and coverage of the honor system.

So it should surprise no one that the CD web site found itself embroiled in its own sticky controversy last year.

The newspaper’s editors wanted to do a faculty salary story that involved a large database, and realized the project could only be done online. Other colleges, including the University of Maryland, have printed similar studies. The Cavalier Daily submitted a Freedom of Information request for all U.Va. faculty salaries. After a bit of wrangling, the University relented and turned over the database.

After a lot of cleaning up, the database, along with related stories, was published online. The database—which includes the salaries of Larry Sabato, Ken Elzinga and President John Casteen among others—is still available just one click away from the CD homepage.

The newspaper was widely criticized by faculty, and some CD staffers had ethical qualms about publishing people’s salaries.

Then-Operations Manager Tom Yergeau said he was flooded with angry e-mails for printing what some saw as personal information. "We had a lot of people coming to us saying we shouldn’t have done that. It was our first web controversy."

But there were positive affects as well. Faculty members who felt underpaid received raises after they found out that less-experienced peers were getting paid more. And academics around the country have accessed the salary database as part of university compensation studies. 

The Future
Clark says the web site and print edition are now considered "in the same breath" of every discussion about the overall future of The Cavalier Daily. This means that CD constitutional changes, financial considerations and style meetings impact the web site as much as the print edition.

But the site, much like the Internet itself, is still evolving.

The CD Online has not been aggressive in posting breaking news during the afternoons or early evenings, Clark said, though on a few rare occasions, the web site has posted stories during winter or spring breaks when there was no print edition for major stories. The staff has set no clear direction about whether to post breaking news online, but may consider it in the future.

The web site is also trying to provide more services that can only be offered online, whether it’s databases, longer biographies of student political candidates, archives of stories or links to other sites.

The Cavalier Daily is also realizing it has a different audience for the web site than it does for the print newspaper.

Students still have the habit of picking up The Cavalier Daily on the way to class, and gleaning most of their news from the print edition. But the CD Online’s primary traffic has come from alumni, parents of students and faculty.