Congratulations to all my fellow CNN.com employees, past and present, for being named one of the most iconic companies in internet history by the Webby Awards.

Back when we launched CNN.com in 1995, we had to figure it all out as we went along.

No commercial CMS to operate a multi-user newsroom workflow across Atlanta, New York, DC, London, and Hong Kong? Figure it out and write your own. 

Traffic doubling every six months and Moore’s Law doubling only every 18 months? Silicon won’t solve this problem for you. You have to figure out  — without more hardware — how to move those bits out the door faster and cheaper.

How to be always-on, like the mothership CNN cable, in a period of exponential growth and frenetic change? You didn’t know from day to day how big the audience might be, what new design or content someone might devise, or what might break. Still, we had to be on all the time.

Of course, sometimes we screwed up or were just plain unprepared for stories and audience rushes that had never been seen before on the internet. OJ verdict, royal funeral, presidential election, impeachment, presidential election (tied), 9/11. 

How were we able to outperform all of our digital peers? There’s no doubt that the entrepreneurial culture of Turner Broadcasting was dominant when CNN.com launched: Ted Turner was running the company and lived upstairs. That ethos was conducive to a necessary learn-as-you-go approach. Mistakes happened, but to survive you had to learn fast, very fast, from minute to minute sometimes.

The reason we were all successful across an effort that spanned multiple disciplines (journalism, design, internet technology) was that we worked together. We all knew that individually we understood only part of the problem, but to solve the full problem we had to share the same goals (get the story out) and commit to figuring out how to get there. Let me tell you a story from the early days of CNN.com that I think will illustrate how a team that shares the same goal can work together to achieve their most ambitious aims.

Election 2000 was probably the first major news event we navigated without a publicly visible web site glitch while our competitors’ sites fell over at some point. We’d had internal challenges that evening, including one particularly vexing problem: we lost half our internal network capacity every hour when traffic surged with each state call. However, we were well provisioned for the event — 20 times normal capacity — so the public never saw the site falter. Late that night, as I was walking across the CNN Center bridge on my way to the Omni hotel, I got a call: CNN would be changing its call for Florida from Bush to undecided. Later, Dave Rickett, Scott Woelfel, and I were sitting in a conference room together doing what people did at the time: hit the refresh button to get the latest vote count.  We knew the result was going to be extremely close, but from a news company’s point of view, we were most interested in whether the results would trigger an automatic recount, meaning the story would continue. Here we were, the only news site standing, and it could go on for another day.

When we finally crossed the number that we knew would clinch the recount, we were flying high, for a few minutes at least, until we realized we had no plan for a tied election. We’d never had to redesign and build the home page in four hours, but Dave picked up a pen and started sketching out a design. I coordinated the tech team, and by 8am we had a custom home page for what turned out to be an even larger audience in the morning.

In the midst of Election 2000, I told a friend with whom I was talking on the phone that I was a pixel on his screen as he watched CNN TV and I was standing on the bridge in the background behind the newsroom. While I was on that bridge, I marveled at how an organization of 3000 people could spin on a dime to cover a story. We were 3000 pixels then who all worked together.

We have new problems to solve now. We’ll figure it out.

In memory of Scott Teissler (1953–2025), CTO of CNN and Turner Broadcasting from 1993–2015 and co-founder of CNN.com.