The 28th birthday of Capitol Hill Blue: ‘What a long, strange trip it’s been’

[Linked Image from capitolhillblue.com]
A biker rides by the State Theater in Falls Church, Va., a few days after 9/11. His flag
helps tell the story of that tragic day. (Photo by Doug Thompson)

It's been a rollercoaster ride for 28 years for what is now the oldest, political news site on the World Wide Web.

By DOUG THOMPSON
October 1, 2022

Capitol Hill Blue started as a one-document weekly news column on Oct. 1, 1994, created after my Internet service provider, PSINet, offered each user 5MB of free web space. I wrote about the absurdity of the upcoming elections and what I saw and experienced in 13 years of living and working in the Nation’s Capitol.

My wife and I moved to the nation’s capital region in 1981, after 20 years of reporting and shooting photos for a weekly and then two daily newspapers — one in Virginia and the other on the Illinois side of the Mississippi River in the St. Louis region. I considered it a sabbatical to try and learn more about how our government worked from the inside.

That time “on the inside” ran far longer than it should have. I produced free-lance stories and photos during that time but I would leave politics entirely in 1994, the same year that I returned to media, joined Alcoholics Anonymous, and started Capitol Hill Blue. Those actions were not a coincidence.

A note to my couple of dozen email friends alerted them of it and they passed on the link to others.

[Linked Image from capitolhillblue.com]
As a member of the House Committee Science & Technology Committee staff, MacWorld wrote about my role in putting Apple Macs into Congressional office. In that job, I also learned about the Internet and how to put it work for media. That drove the idea for Capitol Hill Blue. (Photo: MacWorld)

At the time, most news outlets weren’t making use of the World Wide Web. As a member of the House of Representatives Committee on Science & Technology staff, serving as Special Assistant to the ranking member, I worked on some of the legislation that allowed the transfer of DARPANet from the defense department to the National Science Foundation, which provided the basis of the Internet and web.

The web was taking hold and reports from a Washington insider who had left Capitol Hill and politics to return to journalism caught the attention of The Washington Post, which profiled CHB as
“a must-read for political insiders” in 1995, after the site became a daily with more articles, news feeds from wire services and syndicators, and columns by myself.

Wired magazine wrote about us. So did The New York Times. We were riding high in the times when Bill Clinton was tending to Monica Lewinsky in the Oval Office while supposedly governing the nation as president.

When we began, the Washington Post had started an online edition that was not on the Internet, Matt Drudge was still working as a movie theater usher and television studio gift shop employee and many predicted that digital would never replace print sources of news.

More than once, other creators of online news sites offered to merge with CHB or buy us out but I tried to keep it personal and focused without corporate or business involvement. CHB was a project of a profession I loved and would never be considered a job.

Over the past 28 years, we have broken some good stories — like a series of underground “model websites” that preyed on underage girls — and have had to retract some that turned out to be false –like a story that said then-President George W. Bush called the Constitution nothing but a “goddamned piece of trash.”

The Bush story was fed to us by a source that turned out to be a crackpot. It hurt the site but we kept going and never ceased publication or attempts to live up to our credo that it was our job “to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.”

As was a contract reporter/photographer for AFP News when the 9/11 terrorists struck the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001, and we also provided news and photos on the story and what followed.

When Blue started, some reporters for other media outlets wrote stories for us for free. We had some interns for a while and volunteers. I employed some reporters for a while in the mid-90s.

Capitol Hill Blue has featured a reader forum, ReaderRant, which allows participants to discuss issues, ideas, and a few things not affiliated with the government. It is run by a dedicated team of volunteers who have kept it running for nearly three decades.

We do not support or endorse any political party or philosophy. I consider myself a political agnostic. I did work for too long for Republican members of Congress, as chief of staff and a committee assistant, but I never register for the party or any other one.

As the motto on our home page proclaims: “In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is revolutionary.”

And so it has been for 28 years. How much longer? Who the hell knows?
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It is the role of a newspaperman to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.
-- Finley Peter Dunne